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EVEREST: A THOUSAND YEARS OF EXPLORATION: A RECORD OF MOUNTAINEERING, GEOGRAPHICAL EXPLORATION. Michael Ward 2013 DJ Fine
By Ward, Michael
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Detailed Product Description
UK, 2013 [2003],  updated 2nd UK edition. 350 pp, 1 color, 25 photos, 62 maps and diagrams. Tall Hardcover (10''), DJ, Fine. There are no names, writing or book plates in the book, the binding is tight,  there are no flaws in the book, plus the dust jacket is also without flaws. The Dust Jacket is now protected by a removable high quality clear polyester Brodart dust jacket cover with a paper liner. The acid-free clear polyester will not yellow or crack with age. The Dust Jacket and the Book are both in Fine condition.

First published to acclaim in 2003, Michael Ward's Everest has been out of print since shortly after the author's death in 2005. This new edition includes a new foreword by Eric Vola, French alpinist and UK Alpine Club member. This is the first comprehensive monograph to tell the Everest story as it has evolved over the centuries.
 
The author was medical officer on the 1951 and 1953 Everest expeditions, and has written a comprehensive history of the exploration, aerial photos and medical research done on Everest. This contains much information not previously available.
  
LONGER DESCRIPTION:

This is the first comprehensive Monograph to tell the Everest story as it has evolved over the centuries. Central to this history was the First Ascent in 1953. Michael Ward, a retired London surgeon and mountaineer, was directly involved in the pivotal events that led to success. 

In late 1950, while serving as a Medical Officer attached to the Brigade of Guards, he searched the neglected and uncatalogued archives of the Royal Geographical Society where he discovered the forgotten Milne-Hinks map, as well as a series of hitherto unknown photos taken on covert flights over Everest in the late 1940s. Together these provided clear evidence of a feasible route from south.
 
From early 1951 onwards, scientists from the Royal Society and Medical Research Council initiated and conducted definitive research into the problems of extreme altitude which provided the key to the successful first ascent. Everest has now been climbed thousands of times by many different routes but it was only in 1978, 25 years after the first ascent, that the mountain was first climbed without the use of supplementary oxygen.
 
This Monograph includes a number of maps specially produced at the Royal Geographical Society to illustrate exploratory journeys in the Everest region from the Middle Ages to the present day. It sheds new light on a complex story, leading to the 1953 breakthrough which accelerated the exploration and ascent of the world's highest peaks. 

The Everest first ascent also led to the the emergence of a thriving medical speciality, High Altitude Medicine and Physiology, which helps the 150 million people who live at altitude, as well as the millions who travel, ski and climb at altitude each year. In human terms, this is the main legacy of Everest.
 
From NYTimes.com

Michael Ward, an English surgeon and mountaineer who in 1953 was the expedition doctor on the historic ascent of Mount Everest -- and whose discoveries in a dusty archive a few years earlier helped make achieving the summit possible -- died on Oct. 7, 2005 at his home near Petworth in West Sussex, England. He was 80. The cause was a ruptured aneurism, his wife, Felicity, said.

Considered one of the finest climbers in Britain in the decades after World War II, Dr. Ward later became a renowned authority on high-altitude medicine. For many years a lecturer in clinical surgery at London Hospital Medical College, he practiced in various hospitals in the East End of London.

Dr. Ward was the author of several books on mountaineering and its physiological effects, among them ''Everest: A Thousand Years of Exploration'' (Ernest Press, 2003) and a memoir, ''In This Short Span'' (Gollancz, 1972). With James S. Milledge and John B. West, he wrote a seminal textbook, ''High Altitude Medicine and Physiology'' (University of Pennsylvania, 1989).

The highest mountain in the world at 29,035 feet, Mount Everest straddles the border between Tibet and Nepal. During the first half of the 20th century, climbers could approach it only from the north -- the Tibetan side. But after the Chinese invasion of 1950, Tibet was placed off limits to foreigners. Around this time, Nepal, which had long been closed to outsiders, began to ease its own restrictions. Cartographers and ethnographers rushed to get in, and so did mountaineers.

''Every mountain has at least one way up it,'' Dr. Ward told The Independent of London in 1995. ''We reckoned there must be a route up Everest from Nepal.''

Michael Ward became enthralled with climbing after reading Camp Six, by Smythe, an account of the attempt on Everest in 1933. 

In the early 1950's, Dr. War began sifting through the chaotic archives of the Royal Geographical Society. He came upon a cache of aerial photographs of Everest's south face, many taken covertly by the British in the 1940's. He also unearthed a map, known as the Milne-Hinks map, which had been compiled before the war and included what was then known of the mountain's south side.

A keen reader of mountains, Dr. Ward believed the images showed a clear way to the top. With William Murray, a noted Scottish mountaineer, he approached the Himalayan Committee of the AC and . The two men asked the committee to sponsor a reconnaissance expedition up Everest's south face in 1951.

Also in the 1951 party was a mountaineer from New Zealand named Edmund Hillary. Though the expedition turned back well before the summit, there was no doubt that Dr. Ward had found a viable route.

Studying earlier assaults on Everest, Dr. Ward concluded that they had failed because the medical consequences of altitude were poorly understood. Of particular concern on Everest were the last thousand feet, which climbers -- even those carrying oxygen -- typically ascended in a sickly stupor.

Dr. Ward recommended increasing the supply of oxygen.

On May 29, 1953 Edmund Hillary and Tenzing Norgay stepped onto the top of the world.

Dr. Ward never attained the summit. As the expedition's official doctor, he had to remain some 1,500 feet below, at Camp Seven, on the mountain's Lhotse Face. Besides treating the occasional sore throat, he later said, ''basically I had nothing to do.'' He caught up on Jane Austen and the Brontės.

In the early 1960's, Dr. Ward took part in the Silver Hut research project in the Everest region. There, he spent months living at 19,000 feet and later lived alone at 25,000 feet, where he pedaled a stationary bicycle to study the effects of altitude. In 1980, he helped lead a reconnaissance expedition to Mount Kongur, a remote, unclimbed mountain in China more than 25,000 feet high. Besides his wife, the former Felicity Jane Ewbank, whom he married in 1957, Dr. Ward is survived by their son, Mark, of Los Angeles, and one grandchild. In 1983, he was made a Commander of the British Empire.


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