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Excerpt

I use the thermometer constantly, as I do any other instrument which answers the purpose of giving accuracy to our statements. In private practice, however, the instruments sold as clinical thermometers were found to be very cumbrous, so cumbrous that they were often left at home, unless especially needed. I wanted a thermometer which should live habitually in my pocket, and be as constantly with me, or more constantly, than a stethoscope. Such a one Messrs Harvey and Reynolds, of 3, Briggate, Leeds, have had made for me. It is scarcely six inches in length, and, being slipped into a strong case, not much thicker than a stout pencil, is carried in the pocket easily and safely. It is made as I proposed – namely, by slightly widening the thread above the bulb, so as to allow the mercury to expand for 20 degrees of heat without rising much in the thread. The graduation begins a little above this widened portion at 80º, and runs up to 115º. Even this limit of variation is wider than we need, but to make the thermometer any shorter would be to make it too short for easy reading off when set well into the axilla. I have many times had to congratulate myself on being always ready with this little pocket instrument. (I have referred in this letter to Fahrenheit’s scale which, however, I much disapprove. My own instruments are scaled in Centigrade.)

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To facilitate reading, the spelling and punctuation of elderly excerpts have generally been modernised, and distracting excision scars concealed. My selections, translations, and editions are copyright.

Abbreviations:

• ER: East Riding
• GM: Greater Manchester
• NR: North Riding
• NY: North Yorkshire
• SY: South Yorkshire
• WR: West Riding
• WY: West Yorkshire

Comment

Comment

Via Rolleston (but was Celsius Allbutt’s commercial undoing or did he adapt and take a percentage on the Fahrenheit devices?):

The history of the clinical thermometer is rather remarkable, for though it was employed in the seventeenth century, it did not come into general use until the second half of the nineteenth century, and then really as a result of Allbutt’s invention of the present short clinical thermometer… In 1852 a clinical thermometer was described by John Spurgin (1797-1866), physician to the Foundling Hospital, and Professor William Aitkin (1825-92) of Netley had used a clinical thermometer made for him by Casella; but it was 10 inches long and too cumbrous for general use, “like a short umbrella”, as Allbutt afterwards described it. John Davy (1790-1868) in his Physiological Researches (1863) brought out his observations on the bodily temperature in various parts of the world, and in 1865 Sidney Ringer published his work on The Temperature of the Body as a Means of Diagnosis of Phthisis, Measles, and Tuberculosis. The appearance in 1868 of C. A. Wunderlich’s Das Verhalten der Eigenwarme in Krankheiten (translated in the New Sydenham Society’s Library, 1871) was a stimulus to the study of clinical thermometry and formed the basis for an elaborate essay on the subject by Allbutt, in which he includes the history of his short clinical thermometer. Wunderlich employed a thermometer nearly a foot long and left it in the patients’ axilla for 20 to 25 minutes, and most patiently made these observations for twenty years before he brought out his monograph. Such a time-consuming process was not adapted for ordinary practice, and, as already said, what really rendered its general use possible was the short clinical thermometer…

The experiment of marking it with the Centigrade scale, introduced by Celsius in 1742, instead of the Fahrenheit scale, for which Allbutt expressed disapproval, at once stopped its sale. The 3-inch-long clinical thermometer marked with the Fahrenheit scale was sold in large numbers by Reynolds & Branson of Leeds and Hawksley of London.

(Rolleston 1929)

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Original

A CLINICAL THERMOMETER.
LETTER FROM DR. T. CLIFFORD ALLBUTT.
(To the Editor of the Medical Times and Gazette)
SIR,-I have been urged by several of my friends, whose opinions I value, to describe to the Profession a convenient clinical thermometer which I am in the habit of using. I have delayed doing so in fear of taking up your space unnecessarily, and in fear also of seeming to claim some share in the introduction of the thermometer as a clinical instrument. This I must disclaim, as I have been in this matter altogether a follower of others. From Dr. Davy I first learnt has useful the thermometer would be in observation of physiological states, and I owe, I believe, all I now know and so much value to his researches and to those of Dr. Aitken and Dr. Ringer.
The instrument fell in with the rule which we make at the Leeds Infirmary-namely, that qualitative knowledge shall be quantitatively ascertained whenever possible. I use the thermometer, therefore, constantly, as I do any other instrument which answers the purpose of giving accuracy to our statements. In private practice, however, the instruments sold as clinical thermometers were found to be very cumbrous, so cumbrous that they were often left at home, unless especially needed. I wanted a thermometer which should live habitually in my pocket, and be as constantly with me, or more constantly, than a stethoscope. Such a one Messrs. Harvey and Reynolds, of 3, Briggate, Leeds, have had made for me. It is scarcely six inches in length, and, being slipped into a strong case, not much thicker than a stout pencil, is carried in the pocket easily and safely. It is made as I proposed-namely, by slightly widening the thread above the bulb, so as to allow the mercury to expand for 20 degrees of heat without rising much in the thread. The graduation begins a little above this widened portion at 80º, and runs up to 115º. Even this limit of variation is wider than we need, but to make the thermometer any shorter would be to make it too short for easy reading off when set well into the axilla. I have many times had to congratulate myself on being always ready with this little pocket instrument.
I am now trying to have the temperatures measured in my Infirmary patients, as electricity, by the needle and dial. This will make the variations more evident, and therefore more trustworthy for the pupils, as not more than one or two can at once see an ordinary thermometer in place, and our time in the wards is precious.
I am, &c.
T. CLIFFORD ALLBUIT.
38, Park-square, Leeds, January 14.
P.S.-I have referred in this letter to Fahrenheit’s scale which, however, I much disapprove. My own instruments are scaled in Centigrade. I have omitted to say that Messrs. Harvey and Reynolds supply my thermometers at 7s. 6d. each in a leather case; at 8s. 6d. in a boxwood or ebony case, which makes their carriage quite safe. They are to be had either with a Fahrenheit register, or, as I prefer, with a Centigrade register, accompanied by a Fahrenheit scale for comparison. Messrs. H. and R. say, as I expected, that busy Practitioners will buy this portable thermometer who would not look at the larger instruments.

564 words.

Tags

Tags are assigned inclusively on the basis of an entry’s original text and any comment. You may find this confusing if you only read an entry excerpt.

• Allbutt, Clifford (1836-1925) (22), Dewsbury-born physician (Leeds Infirmary 1861-89), inventor of the clinical thermometer, Regius Professor of Physic at the University of Cambridge 1892-his death ·
• 📌Briggate (14), Leeds' old north-south bridge street and main street ·
• Carl Reinhold August Wunderlich (1) ·
• Celsius (1) ·
• Fahrenheit (1) ·
• Foundling Hospital (2) ·
• General practitioner (2) ·
• John Davy (chemist) (1) ·
• John Spurgin (1) ·
• Leeds General Infirmary (13) ·
• 📌Leeds (235) ·
• London (74) ·
• Medical device (1) ·
• Medical thermometer (2) ·
• Netley Hospital (1) ·
• Reynolds and Branson (1) ·
• Southampton (1) ·
• Sydney Ringer (1) ·
• Thermoregulation (2) ·
• William Aitken (pathologist) (1) ·

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Similar

• 18 August 1889: Eight survivors of prostate surgery present themselves to a meeting of the BMA in Leeds
• 19 September 1866: Consciously breaking with medical tradition, Clifford Allbutt, physician, and Claudius Galen Wheelhouse, surgeon, cooperate at Leeds Infirmary to cure a pericarditis
• 13 August 1877: For want of a bathroom, T. Clifford Allbutt almost loses a feverish patient
• 13 April 1915: During the wartime Serbian typhus epidemic, Clifford Allbutt recalls the open-air treatment he used in the 1865-66 outbreak in Leeds
• 29 June 1876: Uplifted, Harrogate parish church awaits the monstrous £1,800 Schulze organ from Thomas Stuart Kennedy’s Meanwood Towers, Leeds
• 16 February 1886: Clifford Allbutt explains to James Crichton-Browne why three years later he was to trade a lucrative medical consulting career in Leeds for a less well paid Commissionership in Lunacy in London
• 20 December 1868: The Leeds authorities try to make Eliza Thurkill calmly admit she is dying so that, under English law, her hearsay statement may later hang her abortionist
• 15 April 1924: Writing to The Lancet, Clifford Allbutt tells how a nursing hack eliminated (typhoid) thromboses in the Leeds fever hospital in the 1860s
• 14 September 1868: Clifford Allbutt welcomes George Eliot to his house and new hospital in Leeds
• 9 July 1903: Clifford Allbutt, late of Leeds, tells a Bradford sanitary congress to reject the view that (preventive) medicine is antagonistic to the survival of the fittest