Today, a medical instrument enters our lives. The
University of Houston's College of Engineering
presents this series about the machines that make
our civilization run, and the people whose
ingenuity created them.
In grade school, I found
being sick was a great way to play hookey. "I'm
sick," I'd tell my mother. "Oh? Let's see!" she'd
say, driving a thermometer into my mouth.
At first the thermometer beat me. Then I had an
idea. I lay it on the radiator for a moment. It
worked the first time. The second time, it exploded
and blew mercury all over the room. I had to give
up and go back to school.
Fever thermometers were the great tool of home
diagnosis by the 1930s. By then they'd been in use
for only about 60 years.
Temperature itself was part of diagnosis as far
back as we have any record. Egyptian doctors laid
their hands on patients to see if they were hot or
cold. But the tiny temperature changes our bodies
can tolerate are hard to measure. We've had
thermometers for only 300 years. They've been
accurate enough to diagnose fever only since the
We didn't even know how constant body temperatures
are until the 1700s. One 100-degree day, Ben
Franklin reported that his body stayed at 96
degrees. The fact he didn't measure 98.6 doesn't
mean he was cold-blooded. It just means his
measurements were inaccurate.
Temperature is hard to measure. As late as 1852, a
physician measured the temperature of urine from
ten healthy sailors. He got numbers from 102 to 104
degrees. We didn't have accurate studies of our
body temperature until the 1860s.
Even then, thermometers had problems. The matter
came to a head in the New York Academy of Medicine.
One doctor said that "a physician without a
thermometer was like a blind man walking the
streets." When we're attracted to novelty, said
another, we lose the way to truth. We're in trouble
when we lose physical contact with the patient.
That was conflict over the two opposing means we
use to gather information. Some of us trust the
senses to inform us. Some of us feel we have to
distance ourselves from our senses.
Doctors who saw their patients in very human terms
resisted the thermometer. That's been true of every
new clinical aid: forceps for delivering children,
anesthesia, and so on. Each has advanced medical
mercy. But, at first, each has given doctors a new
way to isolate themselves from patients as well.
So I go back to childhood. My mother used the
thermometer to express her care for me. I used it
to deceive that care. The same tension runs through
the childhood of all new medical technologies. Not
until we carry our own humanity into them can they
can serve us fully.
I'm John Lienhard, at the University of Houston,
where we're interested in the way inventive minds