Completely rewritten, McIndoe's Army celebrates the 60th anniversary of the founding of the advanced plastic surgery unit at the Queen Victoria Hospital. It was here that badly burned airmen were treated and cared for during World War Two.

NB: BOOKS WILL BE AVAILABLE FOR RELEASE ON BATTLE OF BRITAIN DAY More exclusive than Boodle's, Buck's, White's and the Royal Yacht Squadron rolled into one. This was how Sir Archibald McIndoe, the celebrated plastic surgeon, described The Guinea Pig Club, a unique body of greviously burnt, often seriously disfigured and handicapped Allied airmen treated by McIndoe's team at the Queen Victoria Hospital, East Grinstead. In the Guinea Pig Club's 62th Anniversary year Edward Bishop revises and expands his perceptive account of its members' courage, heroism and self-generated social and welfare activities around the world since McIndoe's earliest wartime patients founded the Club. He tells how it grew into so much more than a hospital ward Grogging Club in which airmen, who had escaped from blazing, exploding and crippled bombers and fighters, drowned their immediate inhibitions. Some well known members include Richard Hillary, Tom Gleave, Geoff Page, Jimmy Wright, Alois Siska, James Sandeman-Allen, Jackie Mann, Eric Lock, Ben Bennions, Colin Hodgkinson, and Brian Kingdome.

Little more than one hundred years ago, maps of the world still boasted white space: places where no human had ever trod. Within a few short decades the most hostile of the world’s environments had all been conquered. Likewise, in the twentieth century, medicine transformed human life. Doctors took what was routinely fatal and made it survivable. As modernity brought us ever more into different kinds of extremis, doctors pushed the bounds of medical advances and human endurance. Extreme exploration challenged the body in ways that only the vanguard of science could answer. Doctors, scientists, and explorers all share a defining trait: they push on in the face of grim odds. Because of their extreme exploration we not only understand our physiology better; we have also made enormous strides in the science of healing. Drawing on his own experience as an anesthesiologist, intensive care expert, and NASA adviser, Dr. Kevin Fong examines how cuttingedge medicine pushes the envelope of human survival by studying the human body’s response when tested by physical extremes. Extreme Medicine explores different limits of endurance and the lens each offers on one of the systems of the body. The challenges of Arctic exploration created opportunities for breakthroughs in open heart surgery; battlefield doctors pioneered techniques for skin grafts, heart surgery, and trauma care; underwater and outer space exploration have revolutionized our understanding of breathing, gravity, and much more. Avant-garde medicine is fundamentally changing our ideas about the nature of life and death. Through astonishing accounts of extraordinary events and pioneering medicine, Fong illustrates the sheer audacity of medical practice at extreme limits, where human life is balanced on a knife’s edge. Extreme Medicine is a gripping debut about the science of healing, 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.

A truly inspiring tale about the history of the Guinea Pig Club. Plastic surgery was in its infancy before the Second World War — the most rudimentary techniques were known only to a few surgeons worldwide. The Allies were tremendously fortunate in having the maverick surgeon Archibald McIndoe operating at a small hospital in East Grinstead in the south of England. After arguing with his superiors, McIndoe set up a revolutionary new treatment regime and rightly secured his group of patients, dubbed the Guinea Pig Club, and honoured place in society. Based on extensive research into official records and moving first-person recollections, this extraordinary book brings home the heroism and triumphs of this courageous band of men and contains updated material on how their example is inspiring today’s wounded veterans.

Includes the Report of the Mississippi River Commission, 1881-19 .