Amidst all the fear and suffering engendered by these deadly epidemics, German

medical professor Carl Wunderlich made the first

comprehensive effort to document diagnostic findings with regard
to fever. In 1871, Wunderlich began a systematic investigation of
clinical thermometry by recording the progression of temperature
changes in sick people diagnosed with rheumatic fever and other
fever diseases. His thermometers were 12 inches (30.5 cm) long;
Axillary temperature measurements took 20 minutes due to a large
amount of mercury that had to be heated to body temperature. By
charting the daily progress of all of his patients twice a day, he was
able to construct a series of temperature graphs for each patient
(Figure 1.1). He collected well over a million axillary temperatures.
In his treatise, On the Temperature in Diseases, he advocates the
routine measurement of body temperature and placing temperature charts in
hospitals, thus providing a graphic record for tracking each patient.12
Unfortunately, Wunderlich�s published reports
offered nothing more than snapshot glimpses of his raw data and
neglected to describe his methods of data analysis.13
Wunderlich concluded that the mean healthy human body
temperature was 37�C (98.6�F) and that 38�C (100.4�F) was the
upper limit of normal, i.e., the threshold for a fever. (In principle, a
fever is any elevation in body temperature above the normal temperature; in
Wunderlich�s time, however, the patient was not considered to have a clinically
significant fever until the temperature
exceeded 38�C.) Better controlled, statistically based research
published in 1992 established that average human temperature
is actually 36.8�C (98.2�F). A study of human body temperatures
over the past 157 years has shown a steady decrease of 0.03�C
(0.054�F) per decade, additionally finding that body temperature
decreases 0.27�C (0.49�F) from age 40 to age 75.15 It is now known
that the normal body temperature fluctuates by about 1�C (1.8�F)
in the same person at different times of the day and varies from
person to person.16 To address this diurnal temperature variation, the 38�C
(100.4�F) fever mark has been replaced with fever
thresholds based on the time of day.17
Wunderlich�s study of body temperature may be viewed as a
landmark contribution to medical progress because it helped
establish several key precepts of clinical thermometry. First, fever is
only a sign of disease, not the disease process itself. Second, healthy
individuals have an almost identical temperature, regardless of age,
race, physical condition, place, and circumstance; and this provides
a baseline for determining what constitutes a normal body temperature. Third,
deviations from the normal temperature can and
should be measured in sick persons, and there may be considerable
variation of temperature depending on the severity of the disease.
With the introduction of clinical thermometers, allopathic physicians in Europe and
America began to measure body temperature
as a matter of clinical routine; it later became a vital sign along with
heart rate, respiration rate, body weight, and blood pressure.
Thermometers were obviously a practical milestone in this
regard, but only in terms of measuring internal body temperature.
Thermometers were neither useful nor practical for depicting
temperature variations of the body surface or over any particular
region of the body. The key to accomplishing that feat would have
to come from capturing the body�s infrared emissions and then
converting them into temperature readings.