150 EUGENE F. DU BOIS 



in non-toxic hyperthermias produced by warming men in hot water baths 

 or steam. Rubner found that there was a distinct increase in the metab- 

 olism when subjects were placed in a bath at 44 C. Schapels obtained 

 similar results. Graham and Poulton, using a vapor bath, were able to 

 raise their body temperatures to 39.3 and 40.2 for a short time without 

 increasing the nitrogen output which had been brought down to the nitro- 

 gen minimum of 3 to 4 grams per day. This indicated that a short non- 

 toxic fever causes no abnormal destruction of protein in a patient receiving 

 an abundant supply of fat and carbohydrate in the food. Linser and 

 Schmidt studied several patients suffering from acne and two brothers 

 with ichthyosis. These latter could not cool their bodies by sweating 

 and therefore developed high temperatures readily when the room was 

 warmed. There was no increase in the nitrogen elimination unless the 

 body temperature was raised above 39 to 40 C., in which case there was 

 an increase of 2 to 3 grams per day. 



Experimental Fever in Animals 



There is a vast literature dealing with the production of fever in 

 animals. Most of it is foreign to a paper which deals with the metabolism 

 in the infectious diseases of man and belongs either to the realms of 

 physiology or immunology. Some of it deals with metabolism in con- 

 ditions which resemble the diseases of man and interests us for this reason. 

 On the whole, the experimental work on animals is full of contradictions 

 and controls are scanty in almost all the papers. At the present time we 

 are realizing more and more fully the necessity of a large number of 

 controls in all experiments and are discovering the wide range of normals 

 in the species most carefully studied. At the present time there are 

 comparatively few experiments on the metabolism of animals with fever 

 that have not been duplicated on man. 



We are fortunate in possessing several excellent reviews of this subject. 

 Tigerstedt, Richter and more recently Lusk have dealt with the literature 

 in a manner which makes it unnecessary to do more than mention some 

 of the more recent work. 



The whole question of the heat centers in the brain is in great con- 

 fusion as a result of the work of Jacobj and Roemer and of Lillian 

 Moore(a)(&). All of these investigators deny the existence of a special 

 heat center. Jacobj and Roemer produced rises in temperature by irrita- 

 tion of the ventricles of the brain by carbolic acid or mercury with result- 

 ing hydrops and dilatation. Lillian Moore, working with rabbits, found a 

 large range in the temperature of normal rabbits and obtained striking 

 changes in temperature by tying down the animals, by anesthesia and by 

 trephining the skull. Often these variations were as great as those reported 



