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Physicians' Reference Handbook on Temperature, Part 2

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• Thermometry
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A major unanticipated benefit of this new method is the highly favorable patient response, due not only to the speed, comfort, and convenience, but also due to the hospital's employing a method of clearly higher quality and sophistication than can be purchased by the patient. Thermometry is such a powerful symbol of medical care that the quality of an institution's thermometry has a great deal of influence over the perception of quality by the patient.

The scientific and clinical foundation presented in the Handbook is a partial presentation of the results of more than ten years of research leading to the design of this method. The material is organized in sections and chapters, each chapter presenting a specific topic or study, written largely in a handbook fashion to provide immediate answers to common questions on the practical day-today clinical requirements of thermometry, with some material repeated as required by the specific topic context.

The general mathematical modeling and the experimental evidence that provide the foundation for our understanding of the relevant thermophysiology and thermal physics are entirely our original work. They are presented in order to demonstrate the fundamentals that made it possible to proceed with the confidence of success, and to provide those with a deeper interest the means to extend or challenge our work. Since the initial results of our use of infrared tympanic thermometry were unexpected and controversial, we also found it essential to develop and validate a mathematical model of temperature and thermal transport to explain the initially puzzling results, or allow a potentially great contribution to medicine to be discarded as a novelty.

Since temperature is such an important and pervasive attribute of both the internal and external milieu, we thought a brief introduction to the historical development of medical thermometry would be appropriate. This introduction leads to our own work in this field, and the fascinating sequence of events that led us into it, based on the puzzling results of an experiment that failed to give the expected correlations.