Paresis of the sympathetic centers from over excitation by high solar heat, long continued and suddenly withdrawn, etc., so-called malaria : its etiology, pathogenesis, pathology and treatment / by Charles T. Reber.

  • Reber, Charles T.
Date:
1879
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: Paresis of the sympathetic centers from over excitation by high solar heat, long continued and suddenly withdrawn, etc., so-called malaria : its etiology, pathogenesis, pathology and treatment / by Charles T. Reber. Source: Wellcome Collection.

Provider: This material has been provided by the National Library of Medicine (U.S.), through the Medical Heritage Library. The original may be consulted at the National Library of Medicine (U.S.)

    14/122
    tures considerably higher than that of boiiing water. Let us compare the condition of the two living human beings with that of two marble statues placed in the same oven. The statues gradually become hotter, until finally they assume the temperature of the air of the oven ; the two men under the same circum- stances do not similarly rise in temperature. If they did, the tissues of the body would be infallibly de- stroyed, the temperature which they endured being more than sufficient to stew the muscles in their own liquids. But, the fact is, that the heat of the blood is scarcely affected by any augmentation of the ex- ternal heat. The heat, instead of being applied to increase the temperature of the body, is applied to change the aggregation of the body ; it prepares the perspiration, forces it through the pores, and, in part, vaporizes it. Heat is here converted into potential energj'; it is consumed in work. This is the waste- pipe, if I may use the term, through which the ex- cess of heat overflows; and hence it is that, under the most varying conditions of climate, the temperature of the human blood is practically constant. The blood of the Laplander is sensibly as warm as that of the Hindoo; while an Englishman in sailing from the north pole to the south, finds his blood hardly height- ened by his approach to the equator, and hardly diminished by his approach to the Antarctic pole. When the communication of heat is gradual—as it always is when the body is surrounded by an imperfect conductor—the heat is consumed in the manner indi-