Fever: the old and the new

Abstract

Early concepts of fever as a major feature of illness range from those of Hippocrates to those present in the Bible and have influenced cultural attitudes during several major European pandemics of both black plague and tuberculosis, the "white plague" of the early 19th century. Evolving ideas of thermoregulation and fever in the 19th century followed the first extensive use of the clinical thermometer by Wunderlich. Experimental studies on the pathogenesis of fever during the last 30 years suggest that fever and certain aspects of both immunoregulation and inflammation are produced by a single hormone, the monokine interleukin-1, which has presumably been selected by evolution to protect the host against infection.