The nature of fever : being the Gulstonian lectures delivered at the Royal College of Physicians of London in March 1887 / by Donald MacAlister.

  • MacAlister, Donald, 1854-1934.
Date:
1887
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: The nature of fever : being the Gulstonian lectures delivered at the Royal College of Physicians of London in March 1887 / by Donald MacAlister. Source: Wellcome Collection.

Provider: This material has been provided by The Royal College of Surgeons of England. The original may be consulted at The Royal College of Surgeons of England.

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    were maintained in balance by the joint action of opposing influences, respectively motor and inhibitory, so too the nervous mechanism of heat-production was twofold, and in health maintained a thermogenic tonus, a balance between tendencies towards the liberation of thermal energy on the one hand and its repression or absorption on the other. I have to confess that we know little or nothing as yet of the anatomical course of the thermal nerves of the muscles. The motor trunks would appear to contain the thermogenic fibres—if, indeed, they are not identical with the motor fibres. But as to the course of the anabolic fibres we can only con- jecture, and the analogies which we have to guide us are too obscure for me to dwell on here. This ignorance would be more depressing if we held to the notion that anatomy had fulfilled its task and explored exhaustively the whole field of the peripheral nervous system. But when I remember that it is only since the other day that the physiological, anatomi- cal, and morphological relations of the so-called sympathetic system to the spinal nerves have been at all clearly under- stood, I do not despair of further great discoveries. In my own opinion the work of anatomy, guided by the light of physiological research, is in this domain scarcely even begun. When it is complete I have little doubt that the relations, anatomical and morphological, of the anabolic nerves to the central system will appear as definite as those of the motor nerves. I proceed to consider some of the attempts that have been made to trace the thermal nerves into and through the central nervous system. I do not for a moment profess to give a complete summary of all that has been done, even in recent times, to investigate the relations of the cerebro-spinal system to thermogenesis. A very large number of these researches are to my mind vitiated, in that they are merely thermometrical. Without calorimetry, or—what in a sense we may regard as equivalent—the measurement of the oxida- tive or other destructive metabolism accompanying experi- mental lesions of the nervous centres, we can infer little that is certain as to the mechanism of heat-production. The con- current effects of the processes of heat-loss are not easily to be eliminated or allowed for, and the results thus complicated are at best ambiguous. To take a familiar example: it has been known from the time of Sir Benjamin Brodie that section of the spinal cord is in some cases followed by a surprising rise of the body- temperature. In other instances the temperature falls; and