Surviving the Extremes: a Doctor's Journey to the Limits of Human Endurance

by Kenneth Kamler Saint Martin's Press, 2004; $24.95

For me, and I imagine for most readers of this magazine, just about the only circumstances that require survival skills are those awful weeks in the year when public radio stations hold their fund-raising marathons. The physician Kenneth Kamler, however, knows the real meaning of endurance. A specialist in microsurgery of the hand, he's also an officer of the Explorers Club and has made a second career providing medical care to scientific expeditions and adventure travelers.

Kamler has seen a lot of people at the razor's edge of danger and heard a lot of harrowing stories, both about people who cheated death and about others who didn't but tried. His accounts of how it's possible to stay alive in exceptionally threatening conditions cover six extreme environments--the depths of the ocean, the high seas, deserts, tropical rainforests, the high mountains, and outer space. The book is too anecdotal to serve as an all-purpose survival manual, yet it is filled with tidbits of highly entertaining and--you never know!--useful information about the dangers to life and limb that people face when they push into territories that punish the body in ways even medieval torturers could admire.

Maybe someday, sticky and sweaty, I'll be tempted to skinny-dip in some meandering tributary of the Amazon River. Although I'm no prude, I will make it a point not to undress completely, remembering Kamler's description of the indigenous candiru:

[It is] a kind of catfish, about the size and shape of a toothpick. Attracted to salt, such as that contained in the urine within a human bladder, it is small enough to swim through a male or female's genital opening and get lodged in the urethral tube. The fish's stiff pectoral fins angle backward; there is no way to pull it out. It has to be removed surgically.

Even with a generous health plan, that sounds like surgery to be avoided at all costs.

Nor is it beyond the range of possibility that one day I may find myself out of gas in the desert. Looking woefully at the unmoving dashboard gauge, I will surely recall Kamler's story of a mother and her two sons who lost their way in the Tunisian Sahara and died after trying to return to their car, which was only an hour's walk away. Thus fortified, I'll husband the gallons I've providentially brought along for emergencies, hunker down in the shade, and--if necessary--travel in the cool of night.

Kamler is at his best, however, when he writes of places most people have no intention of visiting. He was on Mount Everest in 1996, when eight climbers died in a raging storm. Already on his way to the top, and alerted to the situation, Kamler set up a high-mountain emergency first-aid tent. And during the stormy night Beck Weathers, a climber-physician himself, who had been left for dead by rescue crews, stumbled into it and, to everyone's disbelief, re-entered the world of the living.

The most detailed yarns, of course, focus on the fortunate few who, faced with an impossible situation, beat the odds and came back to tell about it. Kamler tries to explain how they did it. He makes a strong case that survivors are often the ones able to assess their plight rationally and find inventive ways to improve a bad situation. Even with those skills, he concludes, survival requires a strong will--not a surprising conclusion, but one that may lead some readers to be overly optimistic. Willpower, even when coupled with the finest gear and the best training and conditioning, won't keep a climber alive on Everest in a blinding blizzard, or bring a diver trapped in an undersea cave back to the surface.

Fortunately, the point is pretty academic. Very few of us will ever have to face a cerebral edema at 26,000 feet, or a nest of squirming bot fly larvae that must be dug out of an arm with a makeshift knife. And so these accounts of people who endure extreme physical trials can be recommended primarily as hints for surviving the ordeals of everyday life. In short, Kamler's book is a terrific diversion when you can't take the blather on the tube, and all the good radio stations are asking for donations.

Laurence A. Marschall, author of The Supernova Story, is W.K.T. Sahm Professor of Physics at Gettysburg College in Pennsylvania, and director of Project CLEA, which produces widely used simulation software for education in astronomy.

COPYRIGHT 2004 Natural History Magazine, Inc.
COPYRIGHT 2008 Gale, Cengage Learning