(1) Primordial lesioning and stimulation experiments established a thermo r
egulatory centre in the rostral brain stem at the end of the 19th century.
(2) A major landmark in understanding how deep-body temperature (T-c) is se
nsed, came in 1912 when Barbour found that changing rostral brain stem temp
erature inversely raised or lowered T-c, ultimately leading to a mono-centr
ic concept of hypothalamic thermoregulation, prevailing for about 50 years.
(3) The discovery of extrahypothalamic sites of temperature signal generat
ion in the 1960s led to the multiple-input, multiple-controller concept of
thermoregulation. (4) During the last 40 years, concepts concerning thermos
ensory specificity have radically changed from viewing bimodal peripheral t
hermoreceptors and hypothalamic thermoreceptors as the only relevant signal
generators towards a complex picture including monomodality or peripheral
warm and cold thermoreceptors and multimodality of deep-body thermosensors.
(C) 2001 Elsevier Science Ltd. All rights reserved.