On the temperature in diseases : a manual of medical thermometry.

  • Carl Reinhold August Wunderlich
Date:
1871
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: On the temperature in diseases : a manual of medical thermometry. Source: Wellcome Collection.

Provider: This material has been provided by the Gerstein Science Information Centre at the University of Toronto, through the Medical Heritage Library. The original may be consulted at the Gerstein Science Information Centre, University of Toronto.

    405/489 (page 389)
    § 2. The fever in acute meningitis of the convexity, according to the cause of the disease, sometimes begins very rapidly, sometimes more or less slowly. So far as I can decide from not very numerous cases, the rise of temperature very soon becomes very considerable, and maintains itself at striking elevations (above 40° C. = 104° F.) in a conti- nuous fashion ; and rises still higher in the death agony, so that death usually occurs with hyperpyretic temperatures. The whole course lasts only a few days. § 3. In granular basilar-meningitis (tubercular meningitis), the commencement of the elevated temperature generally escapes obser- vation, either because the insidious beginning of the disease has excited no attention, or because the previously existing disorders (tuberculosis of the glands, or of the lungs) have already caused the temperature to be high. Sometimes the course of the temperature continues very slightly above normal, sometimes at moderate fever-heights with (usually) a remittent type; but it is not very unusual for it to reach the same height as the fever of abdominal typhus, and then to display isolated and striking falls of temperature, and sometimes pauses extending over several days. When the fatal termination approaches, after a longer or shorter course, it is quite exceptional for the temperature to rise. In general it sinks rather, if it has been febrile, if not quite to normal, yet far below the previous degrees, whilst the pulse is rising all the tvhile. During the death agony this sinking may continue, or just before death there occurs a final more or less considerable rise of tempera- ture ; the pulse, on the other hand, rapidly increases in frequency, almost up to the very moment at which the heart ceases to beat. § 4. Epidemic cerehro-spinal meningitis is obviously a form of disease, which in spite of the actual identity [of the anatomical lesions] may present itself under apparently widely different symptoms. Accordingly the temperature may pursue varied courses. As, however, observations on temperature have only lately been made at a few places in the last German epidemic, the materials are still too scanty to enable one to represent the manifold varieties of the fever course of this disease in an exhaustive manner. From rather more than thirty cases observed by myself, it appears