FOREWORD 



It can be said of Paul Bert as it has been of Vesalius, Harvey 

 and Boyle, that the full significance of his work could not be fully 

 appreciated until long after his death; but it is tragic that the chaos 

 of a far-flung war was required to bring Bert's work into its full 

 meaning and perspective. At a time when altitude physiologists 

 and flight surgeons are being feverishly trained by all countries at 

 war, it becomes of first importance to English-speaking peoples that 

 the great classic of altitude physiology should be made available 

 in the English language. Copies of the original French edition are 

 exceedingly rare, and one therefore cannot praise too warmly the 

 industry of Professor and Mrs. Hitchcock in preparing the English 

 rendering, and the patriotic foresight of the publishers in thus mak- 

 ing the text available to the flying personnel of our Armed Forces. 

 That such a task could be accomplished in the midst of war is of 

 itself gratifying, for it bears evidence that our perspectives and our 

 scholarly traditions are being maintained and will survive during 

 these years of stress and fury. As Professor Sigerist recently re- 

 marked in reviewing Howard Adelmann's translation of Fabricius, 

 "Today when everyone thinks in military terms I would like to 

 stress that the publication of such a book at such a time also repre- 

 sents a victory equally important to the capture of a strategic 

 hill and more endurable. One can have full confidence in the fu- 

 ture of a nation which in the midst of a bloody war possesses the 

 intellectual and technical resources to produce such a document of 

 scholarship." 



The details of Bert's life are not widely known and it seems ap- 

 propriate here to give a brief sketch of his meteoric career. Among 

 his contemporaries Bert was probably better known for his pioneer 

 studies on skin grafting — work that did much toward fostering the 

 specialty of plastic surgery during the war of 1870 — than he was 

 for his studies in altitude physiology. Indeed in a notice published 



