ABSTRACT
The history of high altitude medicine and physiology is one of the most colorful in the whole of the life sciences. Although there were a few anecdotal references to medical problems at high altitude before 1600, Joseph de Acosta’s description of acute mountain sickness, originally published in 1590, is a watershed. Shortly after this the mercury barometer was invented by Evangelista Torricelli in 1644, and very quickly it was recognized that barometric pressure declined with altitude. Robert Boyle and Robert Hooke constructed the first air pump for physiological measurements in 1660 and Boyle then proposed his famous law. During the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries the nature of respiration was elucidated and the respiratory gases were first clearly described by Lavoisier in 1777. Soon the effects of acute ascent to high altitude were dramatically shown by the early balloonists including several fatalities from the severe hypoxia. The French physi-
low partial pressure of oxygen as responsible for high altitude illness with his landmark publication La Pression Barométrique in 1878.
