Yesterday, I found Auerbach's Wilderness Medicine text, which is aimed towards producing effective medical professionals when in the outdoors-- past the confines of the hospital or university lab. So, whether the doc is in the forest, or in the middle of the corporate jungle, ideally some action could be taken to improve the well-being of the sickly, diseased, or injured.

 

Are there any books on wilderness chemistry? Not only would it be important to be able to check what elements make up potential food, but to show friends neat little tricks by quickly picking up dirt and a nearby miscellaneous object to ignite it, or show other cool phenomena, as well as the importance of understanding how to use the materials from the ground, such as ores, when we are not necessarily near our favorite sources of chemical information. This is, after all, how we started with chemistry in the first place. The difference being that we were in a (primitive) lab, and we could sit.

 

What would you include in a book on wilderness chemistry? What tools would be important to construct? Could anybody synthesize some pest repellant? Lots of ideas here ... guess it would be a step closer to answering what an 'ultimate chemist' should know.

 

- Bryan

there ARE books like this, but I don`t know if they are available to the public, NATO and certain Special Services book(lett)s/manuals contain this info, and you`re taught this in the field also.

Some related information:

 

http://science.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=07/05/28/034201 `"This month's issue of Symmetry, a magazine jointly published by SLAC and Fermilab, is featuring an article that points out the sometimes extemporaneous and unconventional solutions physicists have come up with in (and out of) the laboratory. From the article: 'Leon Lederman ... used a pocket knife, tape, and items on anyone's grocery list to confirm that interactions involving the weak force do now show perfect mirror symmetry, or parity, as scientists had long assumed.'"`

 

http://www.kk.org/thetechnium/archives/2007/03/bootstrapping_t.php

http://www.lindsaybks.com/dgjp/djgbk/index.html Dave Gingery

 

And any information on ores, extraction/purification techniques would be great.

 

- Bryan