A Simple Procedure for Testing the Effects of 'Oxygen Want' on Flying Men.

8vo (249 x 158mm), pp. 4; diagram and mathematical formulae in the text; original blue printed wrappers; extremely lightly creased and marked, generally a very good copy; provenance: number '21' stamped on upper wrapper (?to document recipient).First edition. Pathologist Georges Dreyer (1873–1934), born into a Danish Navy family, studied natural sciences in Denmark, Germany and England with a 'passionate precision of technique and a loathing of slipshod thought [that] characterized all his work'; was appointed to the chair of pathology at Oxford at the age of only 34 (the first of a number of posts and honours he would accumulate over the years); and naturalized and elected a fellow of Lincoln College, Oxford, in 1912. 'During the First World War he […] was commissioned in the Royal Army Medical Corps […] [and] instituted, in 1915, the standards laboratory at Oxford which for the next thirty years provided this country and the dominions with scientifically standardized reagents for serological diagnosis. Later came investigations on the quantitative estimation of tuberculin, on variations in the virulence of the tubercle bacillus, and on the preparation and use of immunizing reagents against tuberculosis' (ODNB). This article describes Dreyer's plans for testing 'the effects of "oxygen want" on flying men whether for selection or for the purpose of testing staleness, flying fatigue or other symptoms' through a 'procedure that eliminates other complicating effects of a decreased atmospheric pressure on the organism' (p. 1), specifically with an apparatus first presented here in a diagram. It was reprinted, with the other Air Medical Research Committee papers, in the 1920 volume The Medical Problems of Flying, published by the Medical Research Council, which noted that Dreyer 'was afforded facilities [in France] for the perfection of an oxygen apparatus devised by himself, which eventually came into general use' (p. 3). This article forms a significant element of Dreyer's 'war work on the oxygen supply to aircrews and on the diagnosis of enteric fever, [for which] he was appointed CBE in 1919', and elected a Fellow of the Royal Society in 1921 (ODNB).This first separate edition is rare, and we can only trace one example in COPAC (Leeds University Library).…