DEATHS INCIDENT TO AVIATION

The shocking losses of human life that attended the recent cross-continent aeroplane flights bring the reminder that aviation has created new problems, not only for the physiologist concerned with life at high altitudes and bodily adjustments in unusual environments, but also for the clinician and pathologist who are expected to deal with abnormalities of behavior and function on the part of organisms subjected to the unusual exigencies of aviation. The art of flying is, furthermore, still attended with grave dangers from accidents which in turn occasion death under circumstances rarely duplicated during the usual course of other fatalities of every-day life. In this country the special features of accidental death during aviation have not yet been critically discussed, presumably because the subject is still so new. During the war, however, the deaths of aviators were so common that the statistics of the injuries which they received in action have assumed