Lessons from the past - human and animal thermal physiology

(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.