Histories of physiology commonly centre around indoor laboratories and experiments on animals and bodily tissues. But, as Vanessa Heggie's Higher and Colder comprehensively lays out, many important physiological studies during the twentieth century were conducted in the field in extreme environments and employed the human bodies of explorers, scientists and indigenous peoples as subjects of experimental enquiry and data gathering. Arguing that exploration should itself be understood as a ‘way of knowing’, Heggie makes the case that in extreme physiology the field was a site of scientific authority in its own right, often exceeding or defying laboratory-based expectations. Whilst Everest could be ‘climbed’ in the barometric chamber, as Frenchman Paul Bert did in 1874, the effects of extreme environments on human bodies could only be properly studied in situ. The ‘placelessness’ of laboratories thereby became a disadvantage where labs were unable to simulate the complexities of place.
Studying extreme physiology consequently necessitated bringing scientific equipment to peak and pole. Part of Heggie's project has been to centre this expeditionary equipment and make ‘a case for the everyday objects of survival and experiment’ (189). Pointing to the origins of many survival technologies used by Western explorers in the knowledges and practices of indigenous (especially circumpolar) cultures, Heggie suggests we should employ an expanded sense of ‘bioprospecting’ that incorporates food (e.g. pemmican), clothing (e.g. furs), transport (e.g. sleds, kayaks) and housing (e.g. igloos). She also argues for the importance of the ‘local knowledge’ that explorers themselves developed through their embodied experience of using survival technologies, stressing that, despite extensive lab-based standardization efforts, determining what clothes and food worked for an individual or team ultimately came down to field testing, where individual taste and cultural preference were often influential. This interpersonal and intercultural variability regarding ‘what works’, Heggie suggests, points to flaws in traditional narratives about yesteryear ‘gentleman amateur’ explorers, with most expeditions employing wherever possible what they regarded as the ‘best’ technologies and knowledge. The Scott expedition's catastrophic failure following the decision to manhaul, for example, should be understood more in terms of contemporary deficiencies in food science leading to insufficient rationing, rather than of British heroic foolhardiness and squeamishness about eating dogs.
Emphasizing the importance of this ‘local knowledge’ acquired through embodied experience furthermore helps Heggie highlight the limitations and lacunae in early extreme physiology due to its treatment of the white male body as normative. She underlines extreme physiology's roots in the deeply colonial disciplines of acclimatization studies and scientific racism. Widespread belief among early twentieth-century white scientists that cold adaptation was primarily cultural and heat adaptation primarily biological was, for example, grounded in racist assumptions about the superiority of temperate over tropical peoples. Moreover, whilst indigenous peoples have long been relied on (and exploited) for their knowledge, technologies and labour in extreme environments, they have, due to a focus on white adaptation, been relatively overlooked as subjects of study for much of extreme physiology's history. This has led to long-standing errors, such as the assumption that polycythaemia is adaptive at altitude due to its prevalence among indigenous Andean peoples, a claim recently shown to be problematic following physiological studies on previously neglected (and, it turns out, non-polycythaemic) Old World high-altitude peoples such as Sherpas.
The centrality of the white male body in extreme physiology was, furthermore, Heggie shows, tied to a research culture characterized by relations of exclusion, privilege and gatekeeping, which marginalized and in many cases actively excluded non-males and non-whites from access and participation. This culture even influenced government policies, with American women being officially banned from travelling to Antarctica as late as 1969. Where women and non-whites were able to participate in exploration and scientific work, their contributions were often silenced or erased in published work (although Heggie takes pains to recover their stories, especially those of women). The relative opening up of extreme physiology in recent years has seen a corresponding questioning of the normativity of the white male body, including it being suggested that women may in fact, due to their greater subcutaneous body fat and lack of facial hair, be better suited to cold-weather exploration than men.
Whilst emphasizing their role in historical exclusion and erasure, Heggie also argues that informal white male ‘good-chap’ networks, based around personal relations and quid pro quo agreements, were integral to extreme physiology's development as a coherent, global discipline. Many of the same white men who climbed the Himalayas also explored the poles or, in the context of late European colonialism, worked in scientific and military operations in other extreme environments such as deserts and jungles, as well as in metropolitan physiology laboratories. Alongside exchanges of technologies and knowledge, this movement of personnel between sites of environmental extremity (both natural and artificial) helped link these locales to each other and to the rest of the world. These exchanges also linked extreme physiology to other fields and innovations. Heggie notes the pivotal downstream contribution of mountaineering and polar research to the development of, among other things, infant incubators, commercial aviation and blood doping in endurance sports. Through the twentieth century, extreme physiology has, furthermore, played an influential role in military science, space exploration and, unfortunately, unethical human experimentation. Heggie thus makes a powerful argument for the need to better recognize extreme physiology's influence on twentieth-century science and society.
Overall, Higher and Colder is an outstanding piece of scholarship that knits together a great diversity of sources and stories in order to make the case for the centrality of an often underappreciated area of science. Whilst much of the focus is on British-led scientific work, Heggie's skilful synthesis of materials allows her to construct a globe-spanning narrative that emphasizes personalities and particularities without ever feeling parochial. Alongside historians of physiology, historians of field sciences, colonialism, exploration, race and sports science will likely find much of interest and use in Heggie's work, and her work to recover the stories of women involved in a historically extremely male-dominated field is a laudatory contribution to feminist history of science.
