On methods for the continuous (photographic) and the quasi-continuous registration of the diurnal curve of the temperature of the animal body

In this paper, the author, after referring at some length to the earlier stages of the investigations of the temperature of man, and pointing out that the first approximate attempt to study the diurnal curve of the temperature of man commenced with the investigations of Jürgensen, of Kiel, whilst the systematic study of temperature in disease dates from the time of the researches and publications of Wunderlich, discusses the methods which he has adopted: (a ) for the absolutely continuous and (b ) for the quasi-continuous, registration of the diurnal curve of the temperature of man. After referring to the method employed by Benedict and Snell for the quasi-continuous record of the curve of temperature, and which, as he points out, is in no sense an automatic method and involves, in a very serious manner, the errors due to the “constantly varying personal equation” of the observer, he declares himself a strong partisan of a thermo-electric method of recording exceedingly minute variations of temperature. Since the time when, early in life, he studied the question, the experimental conditions have changed in certain very important particulars:— 1. By the discovery of galvanometers of the moving-coil type which we associate with the name of D’Arsonval, but which had their prototype in the syphon-recorder of Lord Kelvin, and which are practically uninfluenced by changes in the surrounding magnetic field.