title: Stanhope Speer, Physician and Alpinist: In 1853, First to Describe Mountain Sickness?
abstract: In 1853, Stanhope Templeman Speer published a two-part paper in The Association Medical Journal on Mountain Sickness. Speer was a physician who had worked at the Brompton Hospital for Chest Diseases in London and had been Professor of Medicine in Dublin. He was also an Alpine climber and had made the first ascent of one of the Wetterhorn peaks. His article ran to ten and a half pages in the Journal and to 50 pages in a reprint. It consists of anecdotal accounts of symptoms suffered at altitude from the literature and from his own experiences in the European Alps. He asks three pertinent questions. Is there a condition of mountain sickness? Are these symptoms felt by all persons alike and at the same height? What are the causes, and whence the explanation of such phenomena? In the course of the article, he answers the first two questions but, like us, 162 years later, is unable to answer the third. This article seeks to present Speer's original work and such facts about his life as I have been able to discover.
authors.affiliation: Centre for Altitude, Space and Extreme Environment , London, United Kingdom .
authors.forename: James S
authors.initials: JS
authors.lastname: Milledge
mesh_terms: D000532:Altitude Sickness / Q000266:history*; D049672:History, 19th Century; D006801:Humans; D007494:Ireland; D008131:London; D009051:Mountaineering / Q000266:history*; D015272:Pulmonary Medicine / Q000266:history*