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.

    444/489 (page 428)
    may be modified by it in very many ways. Not only docs it very frc([ucntly depress the temperature persistently^ and sometimes also without any recognisable reason, depress it even to the extent of collapse; but in conditions of inanition, any considerable or extreme cooling of the body, deprivations of nourisliment, muscular exertions, perspirations, vomiting, or diarrhcca, and losses of blood, have generally a very unusual (ungleicli) effect in considerably lowering the temperature, because the diminished production of heat in these cases is no longer able to compensate and conceal the effect of the loss of warmth. This is especially noticeable when the fatal end is approaching. The decrease of temperature in emaciated children just before death is very great, and is especially to be noted in children who are subjects of luetic (syphilitic) marasmus whilst at the breast. In one sucb case, which was recently under my care, the tem- perature began to be subnormal six days before death, and by a gradual process of sinking it fell at last to 25° C. ( = 77*^ F.) as measured in the rectum. In another case of common atrophia infantum (marasmus) it was only 28'6° C. (83*48^ F.). § 2. According to the observations of //. Hoger, the temperature (at least in the axilla) is extraordinarily diminished in congenital induration of the areolar tissue (sclerema of new-born children). He says that the average of twenty-nine cases was only 31° C. (87*8° P.), and in seven cases was less than 26° C. (788° F.).^ As regards this behaviour, Bdrens})rung reminds us of the effects of experiments artificially preventing the action of the skin [see page 143]. § 3. It has been thought that thermometry might afford an aid to diagnosis in distinguishing tubercular and non-tubercular phthisis [see notes to p. 412], or, perhaps it is better to say, to enable us to determine the presence or absence of tubercles in a phthisical patient, even in life. This hope is, for the most part at least, illusory. As the same meaning is not always now-a-days attached to the word tubercles, it may not be superfluous to express my meaning in the following propositions : {a) The existence of cheesy (caseous) deposits cannot in any way, and still less in phthisical patients, be recognised by any thermometric peculiarity. ' I have sliglitly altered tlie text in accordance wiili Roger's own statemcnf, —[Trans.]