Fundamentals of Aerospace Medicine

Abstract

Perhaps the broad scope of aerospace medicine and the dynamic, rapidly evolving nature of the specialty make it unusually difficult to capture its wealth of information in a textbook. Certainly, this book is long overdue; the last similar text published in the United States appeared in 1971-a second edition of Harry G. Armstrong's 1961 classic. To fill the most recent gap, an excellent two-volume text,Aviation Medicine, by Air Marshal Sir Geoffrey Dhenin, was published in Great Britain in 1978. Roy DeHart, a former Commander of the United States Air Force School of Aerospace Medicine, assembled nearly 50 contributors representing the spectrum of aerospace medicine disciplines. The authors of the various chapters are extremely well qualified in their fields, and their writing style is easy to read, considering the technical nature of the material. The book is aptly named—the editor has stuck to the fundamentals. More detail is covered in