Charles Houston

Abstract

Pioneer in high-altitude medicine. Born on Aug 24, 1913, in New York City, NY, USA, he died on Sept 29, 2009, in Burlington, VT, USA, aged 96 years. In K2: The Savage Mountain, Charles Houston described the 10 days his team spent huddled in their tents at 25 000 feet, trapped by a fierce storm: “The lack of oxygen may dull the mind and weaken the body, but there is an inner strength of spirit, a bigger power which emerges undiminished, even magnified, to bring a man through such an experience.” Houston never climbed again after this 1953 expedition, but the formidable leadership skills he'd honed in the mountains helped him make major contributions to high-altitude medicine, and inspire others to overcome their limits. Houston saw his first “real” mountains in 1925, hiking in the French Alps with his parents. As a boy, he had a “reclusiveness that remained with him throughout his life”, his biographer, Bernadette McDonald, notes in The Brotherhood of the Rope. But as a student at Harvard, Houston “found his tribe—a small group of like-minded climbers”. Houston and his friends climbed Alaska's Mount Foraker, India's Nanda Devi, and, in 1938, K2, reaching 26 000 feet. In 1941, Houston married Dorcas Tiemeyer, a nurse he had met during his internship after his medical training at Columbia University's College of Physicians and Surgeons. After a climbing honeymoon in Wyoming, Houston joined the US Navy, where he ran an altitude-training unit for pilots. In 1946, he organised “Operation Everest”, for which four volunteers lived in a chamber for over a month while it was gradually depressurised to simulate climbing to Everest's 29 000-foot peak. After his Navy discharge, Houston moved to Exeter, New Hampshire, where he opened a group medical practice. In 1950, he made another trip to the Himalayas, and 3 years later, organised the fateful attempt on K2. Within striking distance of K2's peak, team member Art Gilkey developed thrombophlebitis. The climbers decided to forsake the summit and bring Gilkey down the mountain to safety. One climber slipped, nearly pulling the rest of the team off the mountain, but Pete Schoening stopped their fall with an ice axe belay. Gilkey was safely anchored to the slope with two ice axes. But when his team members returned after making camp, he was gone. Later in his life, Houston became convinced Gilkey freed himself so that his team mates could proceed without him. Houston sustained a concussion in the fall, but his fellow climber Robert H Bates kept prodding him back to consciousness by telling him that if he gave up, he would never see his wife and three children again. “Once home again”, Houston wrote, “I slowly recognized that they were and remain the center of my world. To risk losing them became unthinkable.” In 1956, Houston and his family moved to Colorado, where he worked as a physician and did independent research into an artificial heart. In 1958, he treated a young man whose lungs had filled with fluid during a climb; Houston investigated the case and determined that the man's illness was altitude-related. The New England Journal of Medicine published his report, “Acute pulmonary edema of high altitude”, in 1960. 2 years later, Sargent Shriver recruited Houston to direct the first Peace Corps programme, in India. After 2 years there, he moved to Washington, DC, to help develop a Medical Peace Corps. Houston joined the University of Vermont Medical School faculty in 1966. The following year, he helped launch the High Altitude Physiology Study at Canada's Mount Logan, which ran from 1967 to 1979. “He was above all a terrific leader”, says Drummond Rennie, deputy editor of JAMA, who visited Mount Logan several times to study retinal haemorrhage and retinal circulation at high altitudes. In 1985, Houston organised Operation Everest II, with 27 investigators, eight study participants, and a simulated climb lasting 40 days and 40 nights. To date, the study has yielded 33 research papers and 15 review articles. “He had a one-on-one relationship with each of those subjects and inspired them to do this very difficult challenge”, says Robert Roach, research director at the Altitude Research Center at the University of Colorado Denver School of Medicine. “That was really inspiring, to watch such incredible leadership in action.” Houston's wife predeceased him and he is survived by his daughter, Penny Barron, sons Robin and David Houston, six grandchildren, and two great-grandchildren.