Read Heat for Free Online Page B

tense, the body shivers, and veins constrict near the body’s surface. The body generates more than the normal amount of heat and sheds less. The white blood cells’ response to bacteria resets the body’s thermostat. The set point moves from just under 99 degrees to 101 or 102 degrees. Or dangerously higher.
    The fever, under some circumstances, helps the patient. White blood cells proliferate when the body is warm. As a consequence, certain disease-causing microbes suffer. Under other circumstances, fever is one more discomfort along the short road to death. At 103 degrees the patient begins to lose the normal sense of self and starts to drift into a haze of fading self-awareness. The patient’s set point—the normal temperature of the warm-blooded creature—has been reset, the internal thermostat turned up. The patient, forehead burning, cannot feel warm.
    Between 1348 and 1350, one-third of Europe’s population succumbed to bubonic plague, with fever and swelling in the armpits, groin, and neck. Another sickness known as the Sweat, perhaps a form of hantavirus, struck England in 1485, 1508, 1517, and 1528. It left patients at first very cold, then suddenly hot and sweating, and then often dead. In the 1520s, smallpox brought by Cortés’s thugs overwhelmed the Aztec empire, bumping up their thermostats, killing millions, leaving behind stories of the dead abandoned in their homes. Near the end of the eighteenth century, yellow fever took about one in twenty New Yorkers: fever and chills, internal bleeding, headache, backache, slow heartbeat, vomiting, jaundice, all followed by a short intermission and apparent recovery, but in the final act a return of the symptoms and ultimately death. Deadly influenza visited the world in 1732 and 1733, in 1761, in 1775 and 1776, in 1847 and 1848, in 1850 and 1851, and again and again, each time bringing fever and death, especially in naive populations, those without previous experience of the influenza virus, populations like those of Hawaii and Alaska.
    From an Alaskan narrative written during the Great Sickness of 1900, which seems to have been a strain of influenza accompanied by measles and smallpox that came into the region with gold prospectors and miners:
      
    You enter a tent and you see a man and his wife and three or four children and some infants lying on a mat, all half naked, coughing up bile with blood, moaning, vomiting, passing blood with stools and urine, with purulent eruptions from the eyes and nose, covered with oily and dirty rags, all helpless, and wet and damp day and night.
      
    From the famous Alaskan missionary doctor Joseph H. Romig:
      
    They were cold, they were hungry and thirsty and weak, with no one to wait on them. The dead often remained for days in the same tent with the living, and in many cases they were never removed.…Children cried for food, and no one was able to give it to them. At one place some passing strangers heard the crying of children, and upon examination found only some children left with both parents dead in the tent.
      
     
    In my Death Valley hotel room, I listen to the air conditioner and read about Kuda Box. Born in Kashmir in 1905, he became a firewalker at age fourteen. At thirty, he walked for Harry Price, a well-known psychic researcher in England. Price called the walks “experiments.”
    In the experiments, Box walked across a fire pit that measured eleven feet long, six feet wide, and nine inches deep. The fire, made from “some seven tons of oak logs,” as well as charcoal, ten gallons of paraffin, and “fifty copies of the Times, ” was ignited at 8:20 in the morning. Box walked at three in the afternoon, when the surface temperature in the fire pit was 800 degrees. The temperature within the bed of coals was higher, reportedly at 2,500 degrees. Kuda Box walked through twice.
    “He was quite unharmed,” Price wrote.
    The experiment did not end there. “Some amateurs who attempted to duplicate the