Wilderness Medical Society: The First Dozen Years

Abstract

This manuscript has been prepared as the tenth Annual Meeting of the Wilderness Medical Society approaches. It consists of a chronological history of the society from its founding in 1982 as a “Mom and Pop” organization headquartered in Dr. Edward Geehr's study to its current status as a national organization with a part-time executive director, two full-time employees, access to the resources of the American College of Sports Medicine, an international journal, a quarterly newsletter, and over 2800 members. Its educational programs now include annual summer and winter national scientific meetings plus at least one annual national specialty meeting, local and regional meetings, curricula for medical school wilderness medicine electives and prehospital wilderness emergency care courses, position papers on relevant topics, and teaching aids, including slide collections. It has an active program for sponsoring research in wilderness medicine and promotes the health of travelers and global health through its Environmental Council.

The Wilderness Medical Society: Looking Backward, Looking Forward

“…Human endeavor into unforgiving conditions has always piqued the interest of adventurers and researchers, and Houston, a physician and lifelong climber (who published one of the earliest discussions of high altitude pulmonary edema), helped organize a meeting to discuss developments in high altitude in the United Kingdom in February 1975 at the National Outdoor Centre Plas y Brenin, Capel Curig, North Wales. [4][5][6] The conference was successful, and in late October 1975 a larger symposium on a range of wilderness medicine topics-nutrition, search and rescue, cold injuries, backcountry survival, altitude problems, environmental health, and trauma 7 -was sponsored by the Yosemite Institute and organized by Houston and Stanley Cummings. 5 Not long after, Paul Auerbach did a medical student rotation in the Indian Health Service and was amazed by the array of unusual, that is, wilderness emergencies, he encountered.…”

“…[4][5][6] The conference was successful, and in late October 1975 a larger symposium on a range of wilderness medicine topics-nutrition, search and rescue, cold injuries, backcountry survival, altitude problems, environmental health, and trauma 7 -was sponsored by the Yosemite Institute and organized by Houston and Stanley Cummings. 5 Not long after, Paul Auerbach did a medical student rotation in the Indian Health Service and was amazed by the array of unusual, that is, wilderness emergencies, he encountered. Because there was no central repository for literature on lightning strikes, snake bites, heat illness, and other environmental emergencies, Auerbach and Edward Geehr eventually began work on Management of Wilderness and Environmental Emergencies, a textbook first published in 1983 and which has become the standard in the field.…”