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.

    46/489 (page 30)
    lii-at upon the nervous system, and Ilermanti Nasse (Ibid., \). lyo), On the dependence of animal lieat on the brain and spinal cord. Gavarret ('Journal rexperience,' 1839), conlirmed what de Uaen had already found, although it was even then not generally known that the temperature of the trunk during the rigor of fever (Ficber-frost), was much elevated, and not less than in the hot stage (Fieber-hitze). AVe are indebted to Dr. John Davi/ for the most important additions to the facts of thermometry, at least in healthy jjcrsons at this period, lie republislicd his earlier statements in * Physiological and Anatomical llesearches' (1839). But during the whole of these forty years, the work done in animal temperature was but scanty, and //. Nasse (loc. cit. supra), has very justly remarked of this period : For some years ])ast the science of thermometry has been more neglected than formerly, and indeed remains aluiost in statu qiio.^^ % 8. About the year 1840, there commenced in good earnest a series of not-again-interrupted painstaking investigations on the temperature of the body both in health and disease. The facts re- lating to temperature in both these conditions were now first collected in greater numbers, and in a much more methodical manner. As regards the practical application of thermometry to clinical observa- tion, which holds itself free from all theories, we find several ob- servers had already recognised the importance of thermometric ob- servations in order to decide on the severity of a disease or its amehoration or exacerbation (diagnosis and prognosis), whilst others had considered an elevated temperature worthy of notice, either by itself or in relation to other single symptoms (the pulse, &c.); but no one, since the time of Currie, had made the attempt (or even be- lieved in its possibility), to evolve practical laws from the course of the temjierature, and, as it were, to map tliem out for others (und sie auschaumg zu bingen). Anclral (whom we consider as in everyway the leader of the march of progress in his day), first recognised the aspect of medical thermometry, and in the year 1841 he formulated a considerable number of fixed rules for the elevation of tempera- ture in disease, in his ' Lectures on general pathology.' Still more valuable was the dissertation by Gierse which appeared in 1842. The medical faculty at Halle had ofi'ered a prize for an essay on the question Qusenam sit ratio caloris orgauici partium inflammatione laborantium, investigetur experimentis accuratius