From the Burlington Free Press:

Charles Houston, the Burlington polymath who climbed K2, studied the effects of high altitude on the body and taught medicine at the University of Vermont, died Sunday. He was 96.

… He was a one-time director of the Peace Corps in India and of the Medical Peace Corps in Washington, D.C., before moving to Burlington in 1966 to join UVM’s medical school.

Sometimes called the “father of high-altitude medicine,” Houston was an expert on pulmonary edema, hypoxia and the effects of altitude and the resulting diminished oxygen.

His expertise stemmed from personal experience. In 1935, his first year of medical school at Columbia near his childhood home, Houston asked the dean if he could skip the last six week of classes to hike in the Himalayas.

The dean obliged, and when Houston again returned the following year, he reached the summit of Nanda Devi, a 25,645-foot mountain in India. At the time, it was the highest mountain ever climbed — a record that would stand until a 1950 ascent of Annapurna in Nepal.

His affair with climbing burned hot until the mid-1950s. Houston was part of two expeditions that attempted to summit K2, the world’s second highest mountain. The 1938 trip, whose climbers reached 26,000 feet, would produce a map to the top that was used 16 years later by the first team to summit the mountain.

… Houston’s daughter, Penny Barron, said his health had declined over the past decade. Macular degeneration left him virtually blind…

Ben Littenberg, a professor of medicine at UVM and Houston’s neighbor, wrote the article on Houston in Wikipedia. His wife, Anna Marie Littenberg, said that after Houston lost his sight, she read to him for an hour a day five days a week — “everything from Churchill’s history of the English speaking peoples to the “Raj Quartet,” she said.

… Houston also had medical students come to his house to read him journal articles so that he could stay current.

… “Several analyses have shown beyond question that the increasing cost of health care is due in large part to the desire of doctors to make higher incomes,” he wrote in a [newspaper opinion piece just two months ago]. As an antidote, he pointed to Grand Junction, Colo., where doctors contain costs by pooling their resources “without jeopardizing one of the good reasons for going into the health care profession: the fact that it is a healing activity which has been universal for centuries and can be restored.” …