There was an ordinary meeting of the Society on 7 October and the President was in the Chair.
The meeting began with a reflective silence in memory of the late Dr Wendy Johnson, a past President of the Society and Partner at Victor Street Surgery who had died during the summer.
The Treasurer gave an explanation of the accounts and suggested some new trustee arrangements now that the bank were withdrawing from being a trustee.
In the absence of the Secretary, the minutes, which had been seen by the Committee, were taken as read.
The Speaker for the evening, Dr Harry Mycock, gave an account of his attempt at ascent of Aconcagua. This is the highest mountain in the southern hemisphere at 23,000 feet. He said he had climbed mountains since his days as a student and this particular mountain is the highest one that can be trekked; that is to say in theory one can get to the top without the use of particularly specialist equipment. One member of the party of 10 had arrived via Santiago whereas the rest had gone into Argentina and all of his gear had not arrived so he had to buy replacements in the nearest town to the mountain. The border area is very hostile between Chile and Argentina and is still mined in places. Dr Mycock had undergone an 18 month preparation for the expedition, for example, even when walking in Winchester having a 26Kg pack on his back to practice. In South America, unlike the Himalayas, there is no culture of porterage so they had to be prepared to carry up to 30Kgs. There is a very rocky, barren approach to the mountain base camp but they did have assistance from mules for part of the way carrying some of the gear. The start of the trek was at 7000 feet and in 40° heat and the mules were with them for the first three days. A typical regime would be to walk for 50 minutes and then stop for 10 minutes, during which one would top up on water and check various items of equipment. The evenings, of course, were very cold. He commented that the mountain itself is very clean with very little litter left around, unlike Everest base camp. Base camp was the place where the mules were left at about 12,000. Dr Mycock carried out daily oxygen saturations on himself and at base camp it was 89%. Ten days later near the summit it had dropped to 79% but one person was as low as 56%. He listed the medications that he had taken with him and he was using prophylactic Diamox. He said that typically one would drink about five litres of fluid in a day and consume 7000 kilocalories to keep up energy levels. He described how as one neared the summit one would trek up to the next camp with half the equipment and then return to get the next half of the gear. This is the concept of “climb high and sleep low”. By now they were just doing four hours trekking a day. When they got close to the summit it began to snow. The high camp was at 6000 metres in a very hostile environment. They had one day’s rest before attempting the summit. Unfortunately 200 metres from the top Dr Mycock’s crampon broke so he was unable to finally reach the summit. Four other climbers could not reach the summit because of exhaustion but five out of ten, including the experienced American mountaineer leader, made it.