A STUDY OF FEVER. 3 



owing to man's extraordinary power of cooling his body, and 

 of protecting it against cold, he is able to bear extremes of 

 temperature far beyond the points which would prove fatal 

 to any given species of animal. 



It must not be lost sight of, however, that man is no more 

 able than the animal to bear an excess of internal or bodily 

 heat. He resists the heating of his body from without, but 

 when his body is heated his arterial and nervous sj^stem are 

 found to be as susceptible to the influence of an excessive 

 temperature as are the same organs of the animal. The 

 terrible mortality of sunstroke, or, as it is called with more 

 scientific correctness, thermic fever, is a witness to this sus- 

 ceptibility. 



The facts and arguments which have thus been briefly sketched 

 are certainly sufficient to prove that an exposure to external 

 heat will suffice to develop all the phenomena of fever. If any 

 of my audience is desirous of seeing this matter developed 

 more in detail, he will find, what he seeks, in my little bro- 

 chure on Sunstroke. 



The first proposition having been disposed of, the conside- 

 ration of the second is next in order. 



For the purpose of determining the action of heat upon the 

 nerve centres, some years since, in a number of experiments 

 upon cats and rabbits, I caused a stream of hot water to flow 

 through a pig's bladder, fitted as a sort of bonnet to the head 

 of the victim. It is evident that with small animals we can 

 in this way heat the brain without heating materially the 

 remainder of the body. These experiments have been already 

 reported in full,* and I shall therefore here only mention 

 their results. It was found that coma, with or without con- 

 vulsions, was produced. Sometimes the stupor came on 

 gradually, hebetude slowly deepening into coma, but in other 



* Thermic Fever, Philad. 1872, pp. 76 and 82. 



