THE CLINICAL IMPORTANCE OF THE PHYSIOLOGY OF TEMPERATURE REGULATION

Journal/Book: Reprinted from THE CANADIAN MEDICAL ASSOCIATION JOURNAL 75 715-720 1956. 1956;

Abstract: ALAN C. BURTON Ph.D. London Ont. The Eighteenth Louis Gross Memorial Lecture delivered at the Jewish General Hospital Montreal November 1 1955. Professor of Biophysics Faculty of Medicine The University of Western Ontario London. WHEN I LECTURE to undergraduate students on "Temperature Regulation" I start by asking them to visualize the practice of medicine without the use of the clinical thermometer to suppose there were none of these little scientific instruments (for such they are) in the bathroom cupboard of every home or in the black bags of doctors and no temperature charts hung at the end of each hospital bed. Surely this instrument has become a necessity rather than a luxuryin diagnosis and in the management of patients. The only other instruments I would put in this class in medicine would be the stethoscope and the wristwatch and possibly the apparatus formeasuring blood pressure. All the wonderful aids to modern diagnosis like the electrocardiograph x-ray plates and the batteries of biochemical tests though of the greatest value to confirm what has been suspected without their use are not "necessities" but "luxuries". I know a great many very fine doctors who do not possess an electrocardiograph in their office but none that do not have a clinical thermometer in their bag. Then I ask the student to consider why the level of body temperature can have so much importance in diagnosis and prognosis. Surely this is only because there exists in the healthy human body the most extraordinary regulatory mechanism of the deep body temperature which keeps it within well-defined limits in spite of continual changes in the beat exchanges of the body. "Abnormality" in the body temperature has meaning only because of the mechanism that produces "normality". It follows that to interpret properly the information given us by the clinical thermometer we must know as much as possible about the physiological mechanism of the regulation of body temperature. It would take me a great deal more than a single lecture even to sketch all the features of this physiological regulation and of course many of you know a great deal about it already. ... ___MH

Zurück | Weiter