Physiological effects of wearing armour and heat

[fernando]

Alow me to put my empyrical spoon on this plate .

Originally Posted by Ed

... BTW, I read in my searches that the load amedic carries is 65 lbs(!)

I was a medic in the Mozambique guerilla warfare. In our case the gear, a nurse bag, weighed no more than some 10 lbs. Even so we were lucky to be provided with a native servant to carry it. All we had to bear was the rifle and ammunition, like the other troopers.
The heat in campaign is terrible, specially for 'civilized' guys out of their usual tempered habitat.
I saw tactical operations being interrupted, due to fatigue caused by heat. I even saw a nc sargent criticaly handing his gun and ammunition belt to the servant, to resist marching under heat fatigue.
Thirst comes along; when you finaly find a puddle, with suspect whitish water full of tadpoles, you don't even give the medic time to desinfect it.
But human condition, after intense training, can endure the hardest accomplishments; in the same manner military comandos or rangers can resist infinitely worse conditions than ordinary troops, so certainly the medieval knights trained themselves quite hard before going into battle inside those iron cans.

Originally Posted by fern

...The problem isn't just the metal, it's the quilted gambeson that was often worn under the mail or plate to act as cushioning against impacts ...

Sometimes things work in the inverted way. I have read that:
To counter the heat, many knights wore a surcoat underneath their armour to insulate against the metal which under the heat of the Sun, would have literally burned their skin.
Still is a riddle for the contemporaneus common man, how those guys resisted critical heat endurance. Maybe many a times they droped down before the job had ended .
Fernando