Extremes: Life, Death and the Limits of the Human Body

Extremes is a book about life: its fragility, its beauty and its resilience. Drawing on his own experience as an anaesthetist and intensive care expert, Kevin Fong will explore what it means to be alive by looking at life's boundaries - at the human body's response when tested by the extremes of heat and cold, vacuum and altitude, age and disease - and show how science, technology and medicine have taken what was once lethal in the world and made it survivable. Chapter by chapter, it will examine the frontiers that medicine has challenged and overcome in the last century. This is a book about medicine, but also about exploration in its broadest sense - and about how, by probing the very limits of our biology, we may ultimately return with a better appreciation of how our bodies work, of what life is, and what it means to be human.