set out into the blank spaces on the map? I n the well-stocked polar section of the little base library I unearthed the packing list for Shackleton's medical kit -- the drugs and dressings he took on the sledge trips of his Nimrod Expedition of 1907, the one that turned back only ninety-seven miles from the South Pole. It added up to a weight of about three kilos, less than a sixth of the modern kit, and to my technomedical mind read more like a witch's grimoire than the best medical advice of just a century ago. Shackleton had isinglass, prepared from the swim bladders of Russian sturgeons. Coated with silk, it was used on open wounds. He had 'gold-beater's skin', a parchment-like dressing only fractions of a millimetre thick. Prepared from the intestines of Each box was like the distillation of all that we have learned as a species about our bodies and their infirmities, a time capsule of medicine at the start of the twenty-first century. oxen or of sand sharks, it was used in the manufacturing of hammered gold foil but also to promote the healing of open sores. He had tonics of iron and strychnine and tonics of iron and arsenic; the wrong doses of either would cause a lingering death. The kit carried a preparation to treat colic that combined tincture of cannabis with tincture of chilli pepper. Ginger was used as a carminative, a sonorous word that I had to look up (it stops