Relevance: Prelims/Mains: G.S paper III: Science
Why in news?
- The thermometer reading of 98.6°F has been a gold standard for a century and a half, ever since a German doctor laid it down as the “normal” human body temperature.
- Different studies have found the human body temperature averaging out differently, including at 97.7°, 97.9° and 98.2°F.
Why we follow 98.6°F
- In 1851, Carl Reinhold August Wunderlich pioneered the use of the clinical thermometer. It was a rod a foot long, which he would stick under the armpits of patients at the hospital attached with Leipzig University, and then wait for 15 minutes (some accounts say 20 minutes) for the temperature to register.
- He took over a million measurements of 25,000 patients, and published his findings in a book in 1868, in which he concluded that the average human body temperature is 98.6°F.
- Most modern scientists feel Wunderlich’s experiments were flawed, and his equipment inaccurate.
- In 1992, a study by the University of Maryland made 700 temperature measurements of 148 individuals over various times of the day, concluded that the average human body temperature is closer to 98.2°F, and suggested that the 98.6°F benchmark be discarded.
- In 2017, a study on 35,000 British individuals published in The BMJ found their average body temperature to be 97.9°F.
- In 2018 Boston rheumatologist Jonathan Hausmann used an iPhone app, Feverprints, to collect 11,458 temperatures crowd-sourced from 329 healthy adults, and published findings that put the average normal temperature in adults at 97.7°F, measured orally.