A dull pounding headache. Body aches that come and go. Chills that set your teeth to chattering and have you reaching for the fluffiest blankets to warm up. But the thing is, you’re already warm, hot even. At least according to the thermometer. That’s right, you’ve got a fever. Throughout the years of making this podcast, we’ve begun many a disease description with “it started with a fever” but we haven’t ever explored what that really means in depth until this episode. We take you through why fevers happen, how they work, why on earth you feel cold when you’re actually running a temperature, and whether they’re helpful, harmful, or somewhere in between. We then poke around in the history of thermometers, exploring when someone first thought to measure human body temperature and how that changed the concept of Fever the disease to fever the symptom. This is a red-hot fever dream of an episode with some very fun fever facts, so make sure to tune in!
| History | Biology |
| Chang, Hasok. Inventing temperature: Measurement and scientific progress. Oxford University Press, 2004. | Walter, E.J., Hanna-Jumma, S., Carraretto, M. and Forni, L., 2016. The pathophysiological basis and consequences of fever. Critical Care, 20(1), pp.1-10. |
| Hamlin, Christopher. More than hot: a short history of fever. JHU Press, 2014. | Grahn, D. and Heller, H.C., 2004. The physiology of mammalian temperature homeostasis. ITACCS Critical Care Monograph, pp.1-21. |
| Armstrong, John. “Case of Brain-Fever Following Intoxication; with Some Observations.” Edinburgh Medical and Surgical Journal 9.34 (1813): 146. | Lewis, G. and Bonsall, M.B., 2021. Modelling the Efficacy of Febrile Heating in Infected Endotherms. Frontiers in Ecology and Evolution, 9, p.717822. |
| Currie, James. “An Account of the Remarkable Effects of a Shipwreck on the Mariners; with Experiments and Observations on the Influence of Immersion in Fresh and Salt Water, Hot and Cold, on the Powers of the Living Body: From the Same Work.” Medical Facts and Observations 5 (1794): 103. | Cimpello, L.B., Goldman, D.L. and Khine, H., 2000. Fever pathophysiology. Clinical Pediatric Emergency Medicine, 1(2), pp.84-93. |
| Estes, J. Worth. “Quantitative observations of fever and its treatment before the advent of short clinical thermometers.” Medical history 35.2 (1991): 189-216. | Mosili, P., Maikoo, S., Mabandla, M.V. and Qulu, L., 2020. The pathogenesis of fever-induced febrile seizures and its current state. Neuroscience insights, 15, p.2633105520956973. |
| Ghasemzadeh, Nima, and A. Maziar Zafari. “A brief journey into the history of the arterial pulse.” Cardiology research and practice 2011 (2011). | Haddad, F., Soliman, A.M., Wong, M.E., Albers, E.H., Semple, S.L., Torrealba, D., Heimroth, R.D., Nashiry, A., Tierney, K.B. and Barreda, D.R., 2023. Fever integrates antimicrobial defences, inflammation control, and tissue repair in a cold-blooded vertebrate. Elife, 12, p.e83644 |
| Grodzinsky, Ewa, and Märta Sund Levander. “History of the thermometer.” Understanding Fever and Body Temperature: A Cross-disciplinary Approach to Clinical Practice (2020): 23-35. | |
| Haller Jr, J. S. “Medical thermometry–a short history.” Western journal of medicine 142.1 (1985): 108. | |
| Pearson, Samuel Burton. “Observations on brain-fever.” Edinburgh Medical and Surgical Journal 9.35 (1813): 326. | |
| Peterson, Audrey C. “Brain Fever in Nineteenth-Century Literature: Fact and Fiction.” Victorian Studies 19.4 (1976): 445-464. | |
| Sajadi, Mohammad M., et al. “Akhawaynī and the first fever curve.” Clinical infectious diseases 55.7 (2012): 976-980. | |
| Wright, William F. “Early evolution of the thermometer and application to clinical medicine.” Journal of Thermal Biology 56 (2016): 18-30. |
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