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.

    47/489 (page 31)
    facieiidi^.'^ [The cause and reason of organic heat in inflamed parts to be investigated by careful experiments.] Gierse extended his subject^ and carefully measured the tempera- ture, not only in artificially or spontaneously induced inflammations of the skin and mucous membranes, but also in various febrile afi'ec- tions (intermittent fevers, scarlatina, measles, &c.), not once but several times, and also the temperature during menstruation and pregnancy, making observations on his own temperature at various times of the day, and adding thermometric observations on plants. Gierse's observationshave long been regarded and quoted as the best comparative ones, and are not devoid of value at the present time. Not less important, although somewhat neglected, were the ob- servations of Hallmann scattered through his treatise on the proper treatment of typhus (' Tiber eine zweckmiissige Behandlung des Typhus^), 1844. He was deeply impressed with the importance of thermometry in medicine, and the necessity of its introduction into clinical researches, and has not only incorporated the result of his observations on the variation of temperature with his recommenda- tions of the water treatment of fevers, but has also added a number of observations on the variations of temperature in the healthy, under various conditions and circumstances (p. 54). In France, Chossai's Experimental researches on inanition,''' which were for the most part communicated in 1838, were repubhshed during the year 1843. (' Memoires de Pacademie royale des sciences,' tom. viii, p. 438.) In the second part (p. ^0,1 et seq.), he inves- tigated the influence of starch on animal heat, and incidentally dis- cussed carefully the daily fluctuations of temperature in the normal condition. Chossat regards the difi'erence between the day and night temperatures, as a proof that les combinaisons d'ou resultent les degagements de la chaleur animale, se font essentiallement sous Fin- fluence nerveuse (p. 554)} He investigates the decrease of tem- perature in complete starvation, as well as in the case of imperfect nutrition, and gives the lowest point to which the temperature falls in fatal cases of starvation. The investigations of Henri Roger, although they have a limited basis, and are not guarded by those precautions necessary to perfectly trustworthy results, are yet highly important. {^'De la tem])eratiire ' The conibiuatious which give rise to auimal heat are esseutially under the iuflueuce of the nervous system.