98 Historical 



We needed to breathe more frequently and all our muscles acted 

 painfully; the heart beats and the pulse doubled or even tripled; the 

 pulse was soft and weak, difficulty in breathing amounted to anguish, 

 and stopped one of us a few hundred steps from the summit; another, 

 returning, had a slight pulmonary hemorrhage; the secretion Of the 

 kidneys was strangely lessened .... no one was troubled by perspi- 

 ration, but thirst was very great. The temperature was -f- 2° to +6° 

 R . . . — On the plain we should not have been cold, but at an elevation 

 of 9,000 feet a painful sensation of cold seized us; our skin was flabby, 

 our faces aged; the strength of the muscles was greatly lessened, and 

 out of forty, only twenty-six reached the summit. 



The evidence of the celebrated English physicist, Principal 

 Forbes, is much more valuable and much more exact. Forbes 141 

 speaks of the symptoms of mountain sickness in reference to his 

 expedition to the col du Geant (3360 meters), April 23, 1842, on 

 which he noted that one of his guides was slightly affected: 



We were about a thousand feet from the summit, when Couttet felt 

 his respiration a little affected, but not severely. That is a very 

 common symptom, which depends greatly on the state of the health. 

 I hardly felt it from here to the summit. But in 1841, I was definitely 

 affected at a lower level, when ascending the Jungfrau. The guides 

 say that these variations depend upon the state of the air; and David 

 Couttet assured me that on different days, he and his father had at 

 the same time felt difficulty in breathing at a very moderate height. 

 (P. 224). 



After all these travellers, naturalists or mere tourists, who 

 spoke only incidentally of physiological symptoms, we come to a 

 scientific expedition which has justly remained famous, the first 

 on Mont Blanc since De Saussure, one of the members of which, 

 Dr. Lepileur, was especially charged to observe himself and his 

 companions from the physiological point of view. And so the 

 report 1 4 - which he makes of this ascent deserves to be analyzed 

 here at considerable length. 



But before beginning the report itself, M. Lepileur, who was a 

 frequenter of mountains, says that in his excursions previous to 

 the ascent of Mont Blanc, he experienced or observed a certain 

 number of interesting phenomena, particularly because of the 

 moderate heights at. which they appeared: 



While I was going from Martigny to the Grand Saint-Bernard, in 

 September 1832, I saw my brother and two of my friends display most 

 of the symptoms of mountain sickness; one of them, a young man 

 twenty-six years old, was seized by general discomfort, fatigue, 

 breathlessness, and palpitations, one hour before reaching the monas- 

 tery, and soon he could not walk without being supported and without 

 making frequent halts at equal intervals. When he reached the 



