A manual of infectious diseases / by E.W. Goodall and J.W. Washbourn.

Date:
1896
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: A manual of infectious diseases / by E.W. Goodall and J.W. Washbourn. Source: Wellcome Collection.

Provider: This material has been provided by the Royal College of Physicians of Edinburgh. The original may be consulted at the Royal College of Physicians of Edinburgh.

    20/436 (page 8)
    disturbance. In the so-called hysterical pyrexia the temperature may be many degrees above the normal without any of the other symptoms of fever. A patient suffering from phthisis may be quite comfortable with a temperature of 1030 Fahr. ; while a patient suffering from typhus fever with the same temperature will be lying prostrate in bed, with marked febrile symptoms. We must thus look upon fever as a complex phenomenon attended by various symptoms, one of which is pyrexia. And in this connection it is interesting to note that one and the same pathogenic bacterium has been shown to produce several toxines, some of which cause pyrexia and others give rise to other symptoms. It is probable that any given bacterium generally produces these dif- ferent toxines in the same proportion ; and thus in any given specific fever the height of the pyrexia gives us a fairly good indication of the severity of the attack. A notable exception occurs in diphtheria; for in this disease a high temperature does not indicate a severe attack nor a low temperature a mild attack. But here we are probably dealing with a mixed infection. Now although we have insisted upon the fact that the symptoms of fever are not simply caused by the tem- perature, yet it must be admitted that a very high temperature by itself will produce a train of symptoms similar to those we have described above. We have already pointed out that the rapidity of the pulse and respiration in fever is roughly proportional to the tem- perature, which would suggest a causal connection between them. And, indeed, the exposure of the isolated mammalian heart to various temperatures has been shown to change the rapidity of the beat in pro-