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.

    441/489 (page 425)
    krankeii), and iu others again moderate and apparently objectless elevations of temperature are sometimes seen which for the most part scarcely reach the' limits of fever. In cases of extreme inanition, exposed to great external cold, the temperature of the insane may also sink in a most extraordinary manner. See the remarkable case by Lowenhardt already quoted on page 204. On the other hand, West/phal has pubhshed observations (in * Griesinger's Archiv fiIr Psychiatric/ i, 337), according to which very considerable elevations of temperature occurred in an intercurrent manner in paralytic lunatics. However, they occurred along with epileptic and apoplectic attacks; but Westphal implies that they had no relation to the muscu- lar spasms or their intensity, and even when the muscular movements were very shght they occurred, and sometimes when these were altogether absent, and also that the epileptic attacks in themselves caused no very special elevation of temperature. He believes just as little in the dependence of the elevated temperature on the gene- rally co-existent acute affections of the respiratory organs, since the latter are by no means always present in the attacks with elevated temperature. [The observations of Br. T. S. Clouston in the ' Journal of Mental Science,' ' Edinburgh Medical Journal,' and elsewhere, of which there is a very good abstract in the New Syden- ham Society's 'Year Book' for 1863, p. no, would seem to show that tuberculosis is present in a large number of cases of insanity.] It is also quite proper to note, as only apparent exceptions—where there are latent processes going on in a case in which, at the same time, only the neurosis is to be recognised, and deviations of tem- perature result; or where complications interrupt the quiet course of a neurotic affection, and although by no means visible, constantly affect the temperature. On the other hand, there is a very peculiar symptom to which I first drew attention, although it has since been confirmed by several observers {Billroth, Ley den, Ebmier, Ferber, Erh, Quincke, and Monti); namely, that in the last stage of fatal neuroses, and more particularly in Tetanus, although met with in very many other disorders of the nerve-centres (of the brain), the tempe- rature begins to rise, and rises in the briefest space of time to extra- ordinary heights; to heights, indeed, which are only exceptionally reached in diseases which are of distinctly febrile origin (sometimes to 43° C. (109-4° Fahr.), or even to above 44° C. (iii'2° Fahr.) and in one case of tetanus to 4475° C. (iia55° Fahr,), which is usually succeeded by a still further post-mortem rise of temperature