Audiology

AVIATION MEDICINE IN ITS PREVENTIVE ASPECTS. An Historical Survey. By John F. Fulton. New York, Oxford University Press, 1948. 174 pp., illus. $3.00. It seems proper that a physiologist should have wvritten a book about aviation medicine, dealing as it does with I. Altitude Sickness and Acclimatization: The History of Oxygen; II. Decompression Sickness: The Genesis of the Tissue Bubble; III. Pressure Cabins and Explosive Decompression; The Spring of the Air; IV. Effects of Acceleration: DimOut and Black-Out; Protective Measures; and V. Man and the Machine: Problems of Safety in Flight. If you enjoy reading for pleasure, open Dr. Fulton's book at any page and start in. Well-written and readable, it blends history and science in a way which might serve as an example of excellence to many of our medical writers. You will quickly discover that the pilot or the passenger in an aircraft can take to the air and land safely only if the designer as well as the pilot do their work within the limitations of man's physiology. You will find that the pioneer in this field was a man who never saw an airplane. Robert Boyle wrote The Spring of the Air about three hundred years ago, discussed altitude sickness, and first mentioned the occurrence of tissue bubbles in animals confined in low pressure chambers. Since Boyle's time, the practical applications of his and subsequent physiological observations have become apparent. One might conclude with Dr. Fulton that one of the first things to consider in developing a new engineering discovery would be the way in which the human organism nmight be affected by the physical and physiological forces involved. Thus, designers should logically ask for consultation from physiologists and other miiedical scientists early in their labors. That this was not always so is attested to by Dr. Fulton's report of ". . . Air Marshal Harris's expostulations in 1940-1 over the size of the tailgunner's compartment in our early B-17 bombers-compartments which to man would require the development of a race of pygmies-. . . [and] ... his infinite delight on witnessing an aircraft designer stuck and unable to move in attempting to seat himself at the rear-gunner's station." This special medical field in which the environmental factors have a vital bearing upon the health of people who fly has expanded largely through the application of sound scientific principles to the problems at hand. This lesson must be applied to every occupational field if we are to succeed in teaching man to live safely and in good health in his industrialized world.