Abstract
Higher and Colder presents the twentieth century as ‘probably the century in which more expeditions, scientific, military, or leisure to such places took place than in any previous hundred-year period’ (3). Heggie traces scientific explorers’ journeys to such extreme places: the tallest mountains and the coldest polar regions. She describes how scientists prepared and carried out such expeditions and how they studied the physiology of human bodies in these high and cold environments. She focuses on the relationship between laboratory and field research and on the ways in which the mostly white male explorers depended on the labour, knowledge, and bodies of indigenous peoples and women. Heggie seeks to challenge the dominance of the laboratory in the twentieth-century historiography of medical research. She compellingly shows that mountaineers’ research in high and cold field sites has repeatedly challenged laboratory scientists and prompted them to revise their experiments and theories.
The book consists of a series of thematic chapters, which juxtapose different places and periods. Chapter 2 examines the sciences of altitude sickness, a strange condition that befalls humans on high mountains, from the late nineteenth to the twentieth century. The controversy over the illness's aetiology provides an insight into the contest between scientists, such as Paul Bert, who studied the disease in barometric chambers in the laboratory, and others, such as Angelo Mosso, who investigated it on mountainsides. The former suggested that lack of oxygen caused the disease, but technical devices to deliver more oxygen to climbers did not necessarily alleviate the disease, thus casting doubt on that explanation. Ultimately, the mountaineers’ field studies delivered authoritative knowledge about the strange experiences that some humans have had in high altitudes. Chapter 3 describes how participants were recruited for expeditions to Antarctica, where more complex experiments were possible, from tightly knit networks mostly consisting of participants who had already gained experience on expeditions to the Himalayas or poles. In addition to explicit rules, this recruitment strategy served to exclude women and indigenous people until the late twentieth century. These networks were also important for the exchange of informal knowledge, equipment and food, which expeditions sometimes left for the next expedition along known routes through otherwise uncharted wilderness. Situating these often bilateral or trilateral expeditions, such as the British-Italian Himalaya expedition of 1958, in national, European, or international politics might have shed additional light on the formation of these networks as well as complicated the notion of ‘Western science’ that Heggie often uses, even though she acknowledges that there were also Soviet and Chinese expeditions.
Chapters 4 and 5 scrutinize the role of indigenous people – their bodies, materials, and knowledge – in expedition sciences. In Chapter 4, Heggie discusses a few examples of the transformation of indigenous culture into ‘Western scientific technology’, such as iglu, the word for dwelling in general, into the igloo, a highly specific term for a snow house and eventually a mass-produced tent, suggesting that there was a tendency to homogenize local practices. Chapter 5 analyses research into acclimatization and adaptation of the White and non-White body between sea-level and high altitudes. Heggie shows how racial theories shaped this research on Andean and Sherpa populations, especially on their blood. It would have been interesting to learn more about the ways in which scientists defined these populations and how the research might have challenged given racial categories. Chapter 6 considers the ethics of research practices that depended so heavily on the putting bodies, those of scientists as well as those of their less powerful helpers, in potentially harmful situations in extreme environments.
Heggie makes a compelling case for writing expeditions and explorations into the history of twentieth-century science. She focuses on scientists’ interpersonal interactions and the importance of women and indigenous people in a kind of research that has often been cast as the domain of heroic men. However, the book would benefit from considering the broader twentieth-century history of Europe and its relations with the wider world. Such an angle might have helped to cast light, for example, on how Indian independence or China's annexation of Tibet conditioned Himalayan access rights and ultimately the epistemic possibilities of exploratory science. It would also have allowed Heggie to investigate problematic categories, including indigeneity, ‘Western science’, and extreme environments. Heggie deserves credit for showing the influence of exploratory field sciences in twentieth-century biomedical research. Her work provides a starting point for future studies that analyse sources beyond Australian, British and US archives in order to integrate colonial and postcolonial international politics into the history of exploration science in the twentieth century.