2006.11.16: November 16, 2006: Headlines: COS - India: Country Directors - India: Mountain Climbing: Staff: BurlingtonFreePress.com: A one-time mountaineer, Charles Houston built his medical career around his interest in and love for hiking
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March 10, 2005: Headlines: COS - India: Country Directors - India: Mountain Climbing: Middlebury Campus: India Country Director Charles Houston to be awarded honorary degree at Middlebury College :
December 3, 2004: Headlines: COS - India: Country Directors - India: Mountain Climbing: PBS: Charles Houston, Mountaineer and Physician :
2006.11.16: November 16, 2006: Headlines: COS - India: Country Directors - India: Mountain Climbing: Staff: BurlingtonFreePress.com: A one-time mountaineer, Charles Houston built his medical career around his interest in and love for hiking
A one-time mountaineer, Charles Houston built his medical career around his interest in and love for hiking
Houston is sometimes called the "father of high-altitude medicine," said Dr. David Kaminsky, associate professor of medicine at UVM College of Medicine and co-director of the Vermont Lung Center. "The thing that Charlie has been great about is realizing the bigger picture: The way the body is responding to low oxygen is sort of an innate process," Kaminsky said. "... We can apply a lot of the principles from high-altitude patients to the way we understand and take care of patients at low-altitude." Houston, a former director of the Peace Corps in India, moved to Burlington 40 years ago to join the medical school, where he was chairman of the department of community medicine. He has been ahead of the pack in numerous endeavors, including his work to develop a mechanical heart and his call for (and shaping of) a universal health plan in Vermont.
A one-time mountaineer, Charles Houston built his medical career around his interest in and love for hiking
Ramblings: Vermonter reached medical mountaintop
Published: Thursday, November 16, 2006
By Sally Pollak
Free Press Staff Writer
About the column: Ramblings is a weekly conversation with people in which we explore the places, ideas and events that help shape the state where we live.
It was "just a picnic," said Charles Houston, of the 10 days he and his father spent hiking on Mount Everest. The year was 1950, and Houston and his father, Oscar Houston, walked in Nepal on the mountain's south side.
They were the first Westerners (with British mountaineer Bill Tilman) to explore this piece of the mountain. Permission for the trek was arranged by Houston's father, a lawyer who loved to hike. Oscar Houston invited his son to join him.
"It was his party," Houston recalled the other day at his home in the South End. "It was very exciting. Everything was fresh and unspoiled, and the Nepalese were so delighted to see us and so hospitable.
"I don't think we had any idea of how this would become a playground. We were just walking. It was just a picnic."
Houston, 93, is a retired Burlington physician and professor emeritus at the University of Vermont College of Medicine. A one-time mountaineer, Houston built his medical career around his interest in and love for hiking.
Houston is an expert in high-altitude medicine who, over the course of decades, designed and conducted experiments concerning the effects of high altitude (and thus diminished oxygen) on bodily functions.
The results of Houston's ground-breaking research turned out to apply not only to people at high altitudes, but to people at sea level who have lung and other diseases that are aggravated by hypoxia, or oxygen deprivation.
"You never how these things are going to work out," Houston said. "I tell medical students that you will never really know until you go look. You have to be venturesome. You have to dare to fail -- and just go for it."
Houston is sometimes called the "father of high-altitude medicine," said Dr. David Kaminsky, associate professor of medicine at UVM College of Medicine and co-director of the Vermont Lung Center.
"The thing that Charlie has been great about is realizing the bigger picture: The way the body is responding to low oxygen is sort of an innate process," Kaminsky said. "... We can apply a lot of the principles from high-altitude patients to the way we understand and take care of patients at low-altitude."
Houston, a former director of the Peace Corps in India, moved to Burlington 40 years ago to join the medical school, where he was chairman of the department of community medicine. He has been ahead of the pack in numerous endeavors, including his work to develop a mechanical heart and his call for (and shaping of) a universal health plan in Vermont.
As a mountaineer, he also ventured to places that later would draw crowds. In 1935, his first year of medical school at Columbia, Houston asked the dean if he could skip the last six week of classes to hike in the Himalayas. The dean said yes, though Houston isn't sure why. "And off I went and we had a very successful trip," Houston said.
In his second year of medical school, Houston repeated his request. "I don't know if that's a good idea, but it may be important in your life," Houston recalled the dean telling him. "He was right: It was not only important in my life, it changed my life."
The climb was to the summit of Nanda Devi, a 25,645-foot mountain in India. At the time, it was the highest mountain ever climbed -- a record that would stand until a 1950 ascent of Annapurna.
Houston was part of two expeditions that attempted to summit K2, the world's second highest mountain.
The 1938 trip, whose climbers reached 26,000 feet, would produce a map to the top that was used 16 years later by the first team to summit the mountain.
Houston's 1953 expedition involved his high-altitude diagnosis, and the team's phenomenal rescue attempt, of one of the climbers, a story Houston tells in his book, "K2: The Savage Mountain." It would be his last climb.
Houston's firsts extend to his work as a physician.
Though high-altitude illness was described in Chinese medical literature as early as 30 B.C., Houston is the first American doctor to recognize high-altitude pulmonary edema and write about it in English, Kaminsky said. His article was published in the New England Journal of Medicine in September 1960.
"A cross-country skier came out of the mountains in Aspen, and Charlie was smart enough to recognize what it was," Kaminsky said. "He was very, very observant."
Houston talks about the "early risk-takers" in medical science who had the courage, the "moral courage," to conduct research and seek knowledge, to experiment and think innovatively and creatively.
He wonders if certain of his studies, including one he called OE II, for Operation Everest II, might be considered unethical today because of the use of human subjects.
The six-week study in Natick, Mass., conducted 21 years ago, was a continuation of Houston's long-term, high-altitude studies in the Yukon. It also referred to his 1947 study, Operation Everest, in which sailors in a decompression chamber were exposed to increasing altitudes, day by day, to see if they could survive on Everest.
"It was a seminal event," Houston said. "A brand-new idea."
In Natick, Houston and his colleagues performed extensive analyses of eight men who lived in a decompression chamber, with the subjects rising the equivalent of 1,000 feet a day in their controlled environment.
Houston studied and recorded detailed information on the physiological and biological effects of being at 23,000 to25,000 feet, and higher.
"The only things I really got involved with were things that hadn't been done before," Houston said.
In 1953, more than a decade before he moved to Vermont, Houston quit climbing. He's never hiked up Camels Hump or Mount Mansfield. He has no interest in the big mountains of Asia. They're too crowded. Mount Everest has become "a trophy."
Contact Sally Pollak at spollak@bfp.burlingtonfreepress.com or 660-1859.
Links to Related Topics (Tags):
Headlines: November, 2006; Peace Corps India; Directory of India RPCVs; Messages and Announcements for India RPCVs; Country Directors - India; Mountain Climbing; Staff; Vermont
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