ing, polo, mountain climbing, tennis, and baseball involve at times sudden and excessive strain, and a wise patient will turn elsewhere for amusement. After the disease has been arrested for several years a little swimming may be indulged in.

Indoor games and amusements are never as good for anyone as outdoor. The excitement caused by playing games for stakes is harmful to some patients and for many months should be avoided except under medical direction. Indeed some patients for many months cannot indulge in any competitive amusements without harmful effects. The strain of playing upon the piano or other musical instruments is not well borne by a number of patients. Pool and billiards entail much exercise and at times stretching, and only when the tables are in a well-ventilated room and the patient has considerable exercise should they be played. Sewing, knitting or crocheting for pleasure or to pass the time are permitted, but those who feel that they must finish so much every day should avoid them. Solitaire may speed along many lagging hours.

The respiratory exercise induced by singing, especially solo singing, should be postponed as long as possible. Gymnastic work, except the use of weights and pulleys, had best be omitted. Hanging by the arms has led to more than one fatal result. Boxing has, in the author's experi

ence, at least twice led to hemorrhage of the lungs. After long arrest of the disease, bowling with light balls may be cautiously undertaken, but the ventilation is often bad and other forms of recreation are to be preferred.

XIII

ON THE TEMPERATURE OF THE BODY

"Oh friend! have you not felt the wild desire

To call your mouth-thermometer a liar?
Would we could shatter it to bits-and, then,
Remould it so it never could go higher."

INASMUCH as it is expedient for all patients for a time at least to take their temperatures, they should know a few fundamental facts about the body temperature and about the thermometer.

The association of increased body temperature or heat and disease was noted in the fifth century before Christ by Hippocrates, the Father of Medicine. As time passed by, however, less attention was paid to it, and when Galen lived in the first century after Christ little thought was bestowed upon the body heat and the variations in the pulse were considered all important. No protest was uttered until Sanctorius, an Italian of Padua, in 1638 published a study of the temperature in health and disease. It was still, however, apparently considered an academic question and only about 1750 was temperature taking in the hospital made practical by De Haen who lived in Vienna. The question of what was the normal body temperature was still unsettled,

and some held it to be 108° F. It remained for a Frenchman, Becquerel, in 1835, to establish the normal body temperature at 98.6°. The study of the temperature in disease then proceeded along an orderly line, and in 1851 Wunderlich, stimulated by Traube, both Germans, published a study of the temperature in 25,000 persons, having taken some million observations of temperature.

The first thermometer was the hand of the observer, often placed in or near the armpit, but this was very crude and liable to many errors. The earliest attempt at an accurate measurement of temperature was probably that devised by Galileo in 1597. A glass tube was inserted in a closed glass vessel partly filled with colored water. As the air in the vessel expanded by heat or contracted by cold, the fluid rose or fell in the glass tube upon which was placed a scale. In 1714 Fahrenheit, a mechanician of Dantzig, made a thermometer, whose zero was at the lowest temperature obtainable at that time, namely, that of a mixture of salt and snow. According to his scale, water froze at 32° and boiled at 212°. A few years later Celsius, of Upsala, devised a new scale, where the freezingpoint of water was zero and the boiling-point 100°. This method of dividing the scale between the freezing- and boiling-points of water into 100 degrees is now known as the centigrade or hundred-scale. It is used the world over in

scientific work and everywhere in the study of the body temperature, except in the United States and England, where the Fahrenheit scale is employed. It should be noted, however, that the Réaumur scale (0° at freezing- and 80° at the boiling-point) is used for household purposes in Germany.

A comparison of the two scales (centigrade and Fahrenheit) may be of interest and of value to those who may go abroad.

The little clinical thermometers, which we now use so freely and break so easily, have come down to us through modifications at many hands. At first the thermometer had to be read while still