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.

    454/489 (page 438)
    |)lira(c{l than in an cxpcrimcnl which strives to represent the pheno- menon in its full and inicom])licated simplicity. Thus, in morbid conditions, the varied operations and effects must be studied within somewhat narrow ranges of temperature de- grees, both as regards the varied influence of suddenly or slowly occurring alterations of these, as well as of their longer or shorter duration. It must further be very important whether the altered tempera- ture in a given case depends on a disorder of heat-production or from altered giving off of heat, or how far it may depend on both these combined. The idiosyncrasies of the patient must also concur in the production of these effects, and peculiarities in his structure, which, in any case, will probably differ quite as much as the individual dis- positions of extirpated frogs' hearts do from one another. More espe- cially must the co-operation of pathological changes in the organs of the body and in the secretions—and particularly in many forms of dis- ease, the co-operation of the original cause of the disease itself, and in all, the combined influence of factors which cannot be estimated, and of the most widelv difFerius; influences duriniir the course of the disease—be reckoned up and eliminated, if we want to estimate the influence of altered temperatures on the behaviour of the organism and its several members, in all its simplicity and completeness (Pteinheit). Such results are out of our power. If we only represent to ourselves in this manner the uncertainty attending such a determination in special cases, we are led to doubt even the possibility of an approximative determination of the influ- ence of an abnormal temperature on the system or its members in any particular case. § 2. Nevertheless, the attempts made by Liebermeistcr, are none the less valuable on this account, to determine at any rate the effects of febrile rise of temperature ('Deutsche? Archiv fiir klin. Medicin,' i, 298, ff.). He has, very properly, greatly simplified the question by fol- lowing out more particularly the effects of only highly febrile degrees of temperature, and he appears to imagine that there is a sort of indi- vidual sliding (wechselnde) scale of elevated temperature at which the unfavorable influence begins in different diseases. He particularly be- lieves in the malignity of many attacks of disease, certain wide-spread processes destructive to tissues, many disorders in the functions of the central organs of the nervous system, the occurrence of multiple