An Epic of Survival: A Mystery of Medicine
By Mr Ghaz, December 9, 2009

In January 1912 a three-man party of explorers from the Australasian Antarctic Expedition set out from their base at commonwealth Bat, Adélie Land, to chart a huge section of the largely unknown continent. A year later two team members were died, and the expedition leader, Douglas Mawson, had barely survived both an epic lone journey across the Antarctic wastes and an appalling, mysterious illness that was to baffle medical science for the next 50 years.

Disaster first struck the team on December 14, 1912, when Lt. B.E.S. Ninnis vanished into a seemingly bottomless crevasse. With him had gone his team of dogs and sledge carrying most of the party’s provisions.


Braving the Elements: Douglas Mawson and his two colleagues
start out in January 1912 from Commonwealth bay. The explorer
were to chart a large part of the then unknown continent of
Antarctica. The inhospitable weather they encountered is evident
in the ice mask that formed over one explorer’s face Mawson, the
only survivor, almost died from a mysterious illness.

Mawson and Xavier Mertz, a Swiss Scientist, faced a 315-mile journey back to the base at Commonwealth Bay. The trip would take weeks; they had food for only 10 days. To survive, the two men knew they would soon have to start eating the six remaining dogs

For the first two weeks, Mawson and Mertz made good progress despite eating no more than 14 ounces of food a day, most of it dogmeat. To make the tough, stringy flesh palatable, they boiled it for hours. “It was a happy relief,” noted Mawson in his diary, “when appeared, even if little else could be said in its favour. It was easily chewed and demolished.”



On New Year’s Eve, Mertz began to feel ill. The next day he was worse, complaining of acute pains in the stomach. In a few days bizarre and distressing symptoms began to affect both men. Skin was falling off their bodies in strips and their hair was dropping out in handfuls.

A week later Mertz fell into delirious sleep – a sleep from which he never woke. Mawson was now alone, still 160 miles from Commonwealth bay and with very little food. His health continued to deteriorate open sores on his skin refused to heal and he was perpetually on the point of collapse. “My whole body is apparently rotting from want of proper nourishment,” he wrote. “Frost- bitten fingertips, festering, mucous membrane of nose gone, saliva glands of mouth refusing duty, skin coming off whole body.”

Mawson’s solitary journey lasted 28 days Crevasses, suicidal depression, and his terrible sickness all failed to claim his life. Against all odds, Mawson would survive.

The Killer

Although Mawson’s diary contained a graphic account of the gruesome illness that had plagued him and killed Xavier Mertz, no one could offer a diagnosis. The first clues did not begin to emerge until 25 years after Mawson’s return to Australia.

Dr. Kaara Rodahl, a Norwegian medical researcher, had long been intrigued by the fact that Eskimos refused to eat the livers of the polar bear. During the winter of 1939 – 40, he decided to find out why. Analysis of two polar bear livers revealed no unusual substances, but it did reveal a massive concentration of vitamin A. Rodahl also established that several animal livers the Eskimos avoided carried similar concentrations of vitamin A. And his experiments proved that such huge amounts of vitamin A were poisonous.

By the late 1960’s, doctors recognized two forms of vitamin A poisoning. Symptoms of the acute variety are stomach pains, vomiting, diarrhea, the shedding of skin, and an irresistible sleepiness. Midler forms of the same symptoms characterize the chronic form – the result of some smaller but consistent overdoses – although mental depression replaces the desire to sleep.

Not until 1969 did anyone ask whether Xavier Mertz and Douglas Mawson could have been victims of vitamin A poisoning. That year Professor John Cleland of the University of Adelaide and Dr. R.V. Southcott, a zoologist, pointed out that the symptoms displayed by Mertz matched the acute form of the disease and those of Mawson, the chronic form

But two questions remained: What was the source of the vitamin overdose? Why had Mertz suffered more than Mawson?

The answers were supplied in 1971 with experiments that proved that the livers of huskies contain dangerously high concentrations of vitamin A. The reason for the difference in the condition of two men: Mertz, a near vegetarian, was unable to stomach the husky meat and had eaten far more of the liver than Mawson.

Ironically, today high doses of vitamin A are proving useful in combating certain kinds of cancer. The next challenge to medical science: find a way to overcome the vitamin’s grim side effects.