Race & medicine
Race and place in extreme physiology
Open access · cc by · source: Europe PMC
Heggie argues that altitude, heat, and cold physiology kept colonial race–place assumptions alive, using blood both as fluid and as hereditary identity.
Key findings
Acclimatisation remained a live research question because polar, desert, and aviation war demanded it. Circumpolar studies often denied racial cold adaptation and praised ‘going native’ (diet and technique). Altitude work mixed blood-as-physiology with blood-as-race. US military money still funded studies of non-white bodies in extremes into the 1960s.
Methodology
The article reads expedition and military physiology, Stefansson and Rodahl on circumpolar metabolism, Macfarlane’s desert work, blood-group ancestry tools, and the International Biological Programme, against histories that stop at nineteenth-century seasoning or Tropical Medicine.
Limitations
This is not a new physiology experiment. IBP dates and grant examples are cited from sources. It does not measure modern VO2 max by ancestry.
How this study connects
Role on claims
Each row is a claim on a concept or method page where this paper supports, challenges, or qualifies the statement. Roles are hand-checked — not a model guess.
Altitude, heat and cold physiology kept colonial race–place assumptions alive, using blood as fluid and as hereditary identity.
Evidence for the claim as stated.
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