High Life: A History of High Altitude Physiology and Medicine
BMJ 1999; 318 doi: https://doi.org/10.1136/bmj.318.7198.1631 (Published 12 June 1999) Cite this as: BMJ 1999;318:1631- David R Murdoch, clinical fellow
- Division of Infectious Diseases and International Health, Duke University Medical Center, Durham, NC, USA
Oxford University Press, £59.50, pp 510 ISBN 0 19 512194 5
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“Now,after the hours of torment … I have nothing more to do than breathe, a great peace floods my whole being. I breathe like someone who has run the race of his life and knows that he may now rest for ever …. In my state of spiritual abstraction, I no longer belong to myself and to my eyesight. I am nothing more than a single, narrow, gasping lung, floating over the mists and the summits.”
Reinhold Messner's description of the first ascent of …
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