| OLOF EDLUND Antiquarian Bookseller STOCKHOLM |  |
| OLOF EDLUND Antiquarian Bookseller STOCKHOLM | |
| $ 39 |
| First English edition. "After the Second World War the Air Force acquired the talents of a number of scientists who had done much remarkable research on the medical aspects of high-speed, high-altitude airplane flight for Germany's Luftwaffe. Most of these German physicians, physiologists, and psychologists were brought to the expanding Aeromedical Laboratory at Wright-Patterson Air Force Base, near Dayton, Ohio. Six of the more prominent German aeromedical specialists, Hubertus Strughold, Hans-Georg Clamann, Konrad Buettner, Siegfried J. Gerathewohl, and the brothers Fritz and Heinz Haber, were assigned as research physicians to the Air Force School of Aviation Medicine, located on the scrub prairies of south central Texas at Randolph Air Force Base, outside San Antonio. The commandant of the school was Colonel Harry G. Armstrong, author of the classic text in aviation medicine. While heavily instrumented V-2s lumbered upward from White Sands and plastic research balloons lifted seeds, mice, hamsters, fruit flies, and other specimens into the upper atmosphere, Armstrong and his associates were already considering the medical implications of flight by man into the hostile space environment. In November 1948, Armstrong organized at Randolph a panel discussion on the "Aeromedical Problems of Space Travel." Featuring papers by Strughold and Heinz Haber and commentary by six well-known scientists from universities and the military, the symposium perhaps marked the beginning of formal, academic inquiry into the medical hazards of extra-atmospheric flight. Before this epochal gathering ended, Strughold had resolved the contradiction inherent in the title of the symposium by emphatically using the term "space medicine." The following February, Armstrong set up the world's first Department of Space Medicine, headed by Strughold and including the Habers and Konrad Buettner. In November 1951, at San Antonio, the School of Aviation Medicine and the privately financedLovelace Foundation for Medical Research at Albuquerque, New Mexico, sponsored a symposium discreetly entitled "Physics and Medicine of the Upper Atmosphere." It was still not respectable to speak plainly of space flight within the Air Force, which only that year had cautiously reactivated its intercontinental ballistic missile project and remained sensitive to "Buck Rogers" epithets from members of Congress and the taxpaying public. A good portion of the material presented by the 44 speakers at the 1951 symposium, however, covered the nature of space, the mechanics of space flight, and the medical difficulties of sending a man beyond the sensible and breathable atmosphere"(http://www.hq.nasa.gov/office/pao/History). |