John Paul Stapp: the fastest man on earth, who saved millions

There’s a moment in Craig Ryan’s spectacular biography of John Paul Stapp — the maverick American Air Force doctor who, in the 1950s, became the fastest man on earth — where the reader falls inexorably in love with Ryan’s subject. It’s on page 17, when Stapp encounters what his Baptist missionary father had taught his sons to prepare for: ‘The epiphany that would illuminate the nature of their calling.’

Christmas is three days gone, and Stapp’s two-year-old cousin, momentarily alone in front of the fireplace, throws part of the Sunday newspaper over the grate. It ignites, catching the boy’s cotton pyjamas, setting them ablaze. Someone plunges the child into a tub of icy water outside, but the burns are horrific. The 18-year-old John Paul (named after his father’s favourite two apostles) watches as the local doctor treats the boy with a mixture of lime and linseed oil, and John Paul remains awake for the better part of 60 hours at his cousin’s side, doing what he can, until, inevitably, the boy dies. The adolescent Stapp rages against the ineffective ‘dolt’ of a doctor, who, in Stapp’s opinion, should have immediately transported the boy to hospital in nearby Austin. Rendered with the unsentimental clarity of Ryan’s prose, the event is heartbreaking.

The incident galvanises the young Stapp into his cause: the protection of the human body By the time of his own death, in 1999, he was perhaps ‘indirectly responsible for saving more lives than anyone in history’.

In 1944, during his second year of medical school, Stapp was drafted into the United States Medical Corps. Enamoured by aviation, he applied to the School of Aviation Medicine and became a flight surgeon. He accepted a project at Muroc Air Base, a remote and desolate place up in the high elevations of the bone-dry Mojave desert, which was about to become the touchline of the future.