A History of General Refrigeration

Ancient societies figured out that hypothermia was useful for hemorrhage control, but it was Hippocrates who realized that body heat could be a diagnostic tool. He caked his patients in mud, deducing that warmer areas dried first.   Typhoid fever, the plague of Athens in 400 BC and the demise of the Jamestown Colony in the early 1600s, led Robert Boyle to attempt to cure it around 1650 by dunking patients in ice-cold brine. This is likely the first application of therapeutic hypothermia, but it failed to lower the 30 to 40 percent mortality rate. One hundred years later, James Currie tried to treat fevers by applying hot, cold, and warm to the surface and having the patients drink liquids at those temperatures. These innovations were not any more successful than the brine, however.   Hydropaths, popular in the early 1800s, were referred to by Sir William Osler as “hermaphrodite practitioners who look upon water as a cure-all.” He realized, however, the therapeutic effects of using water for compresses and baths. One hydropath taught Osler that a rigid protocol of cold baths for typhoid fever could save lives, and Osler implemented this at Johns Hopkins. He published this protocol in the article, “The Cold-Bath Treatment of Typhoid Fever” in 1892, and physicians everywhere saw a drop in mortality.   Physicians had come to believe by the 1930s that cold was incompatible with life. All clinical thermometers of the time were calibrated only to 94°F, and this thermal b...
Source: Spontaneous Circulation - Category: Emergency Medicine Tags: Blog Posts Source Type: blogs