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Wilderness Medicine

OR PERISH IN THE ATTEMPT Wilderness Medicine in the Lewis and Clark Expedition Dave Peck Farcountry Press, Helena, Montana, 2002. Illustrations, appendixes, notes, bibliography, index. 351 pp. $18.95 paper.

We have arrived at the bicentennial of the epic adventure of Meriwether Lewis and William Clark. For those participating in the celebration, for students of the period, and for people like myself who are interested in frontier medicine, Or Perish in the Attempt is a must-read. It is skillfully written, timely, and well researched. The author is a practicing physician capable of evaluating the medical aspects of this multifaceted undertaking. But this is not just another book based on the two-hundred-year-old journals. Instead it offers the reader a fuller appreciation of the expedition's dangers and the ways the two military men, although they were not physicians, solved these injuries and illnesses. It is not a stretch to say that without the captains' abilities as frontier physicians more than one expedition member would have died.

The medical aspects of the Lewis and Clark Expedition have not received the amount of attention they deserve. For many years Dr. E. G. Chuinard's Only One Man Died (1979) was the best reference on this subject. Since its publication, however, more information has surfaced, and Or Perish in the Attempt will rightfully take its place alongside Chuinard's book. Readers are not only kept abreast of the explorers' eight-thousand-mile trek, but are treated to a skillful appraisal of the illnesses and injuries as they presented themselves, including comparisons between modern medical understanding and that of the period-a time that still held to many theories of illness dating from Hippocrates. Dr. Peck, however, is careful to emphasize that Lewis and Clark applied their knowledge with skill and professionalism. Nowhere does he belittle the captains' practice of nineteenth-century medicine. In the end, "Through myriad physical problems, with little training and few resources, Lewis and Clark did the best job they could as America's first wilderness physicians" (p. 307).

Volney Steele

Bozeman, Montana

Copyright Montana Historical Society Autumn 2004
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