The origins and fate of James Currie's cold water treatment for fever.

There is now an established understanding that sweat, and perspiration in general, function as an important regulator of body temperature. This understanding has displaced the earlier view of humoral pathology, that sweating is a means of excreting excess or ill-mixed humours. Its role in regulating heat loss could not be clearly discerned until the measurement of heat loss by evaporation in the eighteenth century, particularly by William Cullen (1710-90) and his pupils. This paper's aim is to describe how understanding of heat loss from the human body developed, especially in the hands of James Currie (1756-1805), and how the growing understanding accompanied a novel and for some time popular approach to the treatment of fevers. The function of sweating was understood in antiquity to be the excretion of surplus "wet" from the body, "wet" being one of the four "qualities" (warm, cold, dry, and wet) and not one of the four humours (black bile, yellow bile, phlegm and blood).' During the long ascendancy of humoral pathology, the natural belief was that excesses of humours too could be unloaded in this way, as they could by the kidneys and the alimentary canal. So Galen refers to sweat as an excretion: