The first case in which the cold-water treatment was practiced in the Philadelphia Hospital was that of a woman suffering from a desperate relapse of typhoid fever.  She was semi-comatose, with a pulse of 150 and a temperature of 107 deg.  Fahrenheit:  death was seemingly inevitable and imminent.  As the bath-tubs were not convenient, the order was given that the woman be laid upon an India-rubber cloth, and be wrapped simply in a sheet constantly wet with water at a temperature as near 32 deg. as practicable.  The nurses, aghast, refused at first to carry out the order, but the physician’s power being despotic, obedience was enforced.  About three pints of whisky were given in the twenty-four hours, besides drugs, the whole treatment being successful.

It has been shown that excessive bodily heat is capable of producing the various symptoms of fever, and that its withdrawal is followed by the immediate relief of these symptoms; and since excessive heat is always present in fever, it is a logical deduction that it is the cause of fever symptoms; or, in other words, that it is the essential part of fever.

It must be borne in mind, however, that the term fever is here used in an abstract sense, to express a general diseased process, a bodily condition. A fever is a very different thing from fever.  We may have a fever, such as typhoid, without the existence of fever.  In a fever, the fever—­i.e., the elevation of temperature—­is only part of the disease, and great judgment and experience are often required to decide how much of the general symptoms is caused by the fever, and how much by the disease which is the cause of the fever.

The importance of high temperature having been recognized, it becomes a matter of the gravest scientific and practical interest to determine the method in which it is produced.

There are only two systems which bind the body together—­namely, the circulation and the nervous system.  As fever is usually a universal phenomenon, occurring simultaneously in every part of the body, it must be produced either through the nervous system or by a poison in the blood acting simultaneously on every tissue.  Every physician knows, however, that there are cases of fever in which there has been no introduction of a poison into the blood:  hence it follows that at least sometimes fever must be produced by the nervous system.

This being so, the study of the influence of the nervous system upon animal heat is naturally the next step in our investigation.  Before making this step it may be well to call to mind the fact that chemical processes are usually accompanied either by the giving out or the withdrawal of heat.  Thus, the chemical actions which result when ice and salt are mixed cause a withdrawal of heat, and a “freezing mixture” is formed.  When a candle is burnt, the oxidation of its constituents, a chemical process, evolves heat.  Oxidation is the great source of artificial heat, and animal heat is chiefly generated by the same process; in other words, animal heat is always the product of the chemical movements of the body, and these movements are almost exclusively of the character of oxidation.  In the animal tissues a lessened oxidation is equivalent to a lessened heat-production, and vise versa.