17 Études cliniques et thermométriques sur les Maladies du Système nerveux, 1872.
The initial fall of temperature is not so likely to be observed except in institutions like the Salpêtrière, where large numbers of old persons are collected and under close medical surveillance; and, indeed, it may be doubted, even from Bourneville's own table, whether the rule is one without exceptions. At any rate, the rise is a more important phenomenon than the fall. When the rise of temperature is interrupted by a fall, and then continues again, it is due, according to the author already quoted, to a renewal of the hemorrhage.
These changes of temperature may be noted with various locations of the lesion, but it seems probable that further study might make them useful in diagnosis as well as prognosis. Hale White reports the case of a boy aged six and a half years, who was found unconscious with right hemiplegia, and who afterward had many and various paralyses with hyperpyrexia, the highest temperature being 107°. He lived long enough for secondary degeneration to extend down the crura and into the anterior cornua. A small soft patch a quarter of an inch in diameter existed at the anterior part of each corpus striatum.18
18 Guy's Hosp. Rep., 1882.
FIG. 37.
The chart W. H. (Fig. 37) is from a man aged fifty who fell in the street while returning from work at noon, and whose axillary temperature was taken at 5 P.M. and every two hours thereafter until death. The hemiplegia was not very marked, but the hemorrhage was extensive, involving the pons and left crus cerebri, the external capsule, left crus cerebelli, and medulla, bursting through into the fourth ventricle.