VIEWS ON FEVER.

Otago Daily Times, Issue 20291, 27 December 1927, Page 10

VIEWS ON FEVER.

IDEAS OF MODERN PHYSICIANS. Fever is to-day regarded by physicians in a totally different light from what it was a few years ago (says a writer in Modern Science, London). Then it was thought to be a wholly bad thing in itself, to be reduced at any cost, comments the Literary Digest. The .increased heat production is now looked on as areaction on the part of the living cells to the noxious stimulus of the microorganisms or their soluble poisons, a response of a protective nature rather than of any other kind. He goes on:— “ The indiscriminate lowering of the temperature by drugs is not now nearly to common as it used to be. It is recognised as possible that the increase of heal may be evidence of sufficient vitality on the part of the living protoplasm to withstand the assaults of the infective agents, being the biophysical response to the micro-organic assaults, ihe drugs which benefit fever most are now regarded as doing so, not because they lower the temperature because they attack the specific cause of the maladay ; quinine, for instance, in malaria destroying the parasitic plasmodium and th© salicylates antagonising th© poison of rheumatic fever. “ Those versed in vegetable physiology have been able to show that even in the case of parasites attacking trees there is a rise of temperature as a reaction to these assaults; and therefore botanists actually speak of ‘ fever in plants. “Of course, it is not to be imagined that in no circumstances is fever, or very hot blood, injurious to the body. Within the last few years definite ex periments have been made showing that blood hotter than a certain temperature does permanently damage the cells of the central nervious system. ‘ Sunstroke, as it is csllfid, is the result of the hot blood injuring th© cells of the brain, especially those related to consciousness. When the cells are only slightly injured, the person may recover, and be ‘a little queer in the head’ for the rest of ms life; if, however, the cells are decidedly overheated, as in ‘heat-stroke’ or ‘heatapoplexy,’ death in collapse supervenes, the person never regaining consciousness. Heat-stroke of this kind may occur in places to which the sun never gains access, as, for instance, in front of the furnaces of a steamer in the Red Sea. “On the other hand, depression of the temperature of the blood below its normal is as fatal, although not so rapidly, and for quite other reasons. Great loss of heat depresses th© tissues so that death results. “What is known to coroners nines as ‘ death from exposure ’ is really due to heat-loss. An underfed, poorly clothed, and perhaps intoxicated person falls asleep out of doots on a frosty night; so much n'-at is lost that the heart and nervous system never recover; the person never wakes. The lowest temperature in man, namely, 80 degrees F., that has been recorded has been under these conditions.