The clinical importance of records of body-temperature, as taken usually in the mouth and occasionally in the axilla or rectum, has quite obscured the physiological significance of the skin temperature. Extensive researches have shown that the temperature of the human body, deep in the body trunk or in any of the natural cavities, remains reasonably constant, although there is a diurnal ryhthm, with a minimum value at about 4 a.m. and a maximum at about 5 p.m. Simultaneous observations of temperature at different parts of the body show that there is almost always a parallelism in curves for temperature. Thus, the temperatures in the rectum or vagina, the well-closed groin or axilla, and the mouth, show similarly shaped curves, although at markedly different levels.

No abstract