Читать книгу Maths on the Back of an Envelope - Rob Eastaway - Страница 11

In 1871, a German physician by the name of Carl Reinhold Wunderlich published a ground-breaking report on his research into human body temperature. The main finding that he wanted to publicise was that the average person’s body temperature is 98.6 degrees Fahrenheit, though this figure will vary quite a bit from person to person.

The figure of 98.6 °F has become gospel,5 the benchmark body temperature that parents have used ever since when checking if an unwell child has some sort of fever.

Except it turns out that Wunderlich didn’t publish the figure 98.6 °F. He was working in Celsius, and the figure he published was 37 °C, a rounded number, which he qualified by saying that it can vary by up to half a degree, depending on the individual and on where the temperature is taken (armpit or, ahem, orifice).

The figure 98.6 came from the translation of Wunderlich’s report into English. At the time, Fahrenheit was the commonly used scale in Britain. To convert 37 °C to Fahrenheit, you multiply by 9, divide by 5 and add 32; i.e. 37 °C converts to 98.6 °F. So the English translation – which reached a far bigger audience than the German original, gave the figure 98.6 °F as the human norm. Technically, they were right to do this, but the decimal place created a misleading impression. If Wunderlich had quoted the temperature as 37.0 °C, it would have been reasonable to quote this as 98.6 °F, but Wunderlich deliberately didn’t quote his rough figure to the decimal place. For a figure that can vary by nearly a whole degree between healthy individuals, 98.6 °F was (and is) spurious precision. And in any case, a study in 2015 using modern, more accurate thermometers, found that we’ve been getting it wrong all these years, and that the average human temperature is 98.2 °F, not 98.6 °F.