A fever is very uncomfortable to the person suffering from it, but is not in itself particularly dangerous, unless it mounts to a very high degree. The body wastes away rapidly, of course, because of the increased metabolism which is usually not balanced by any taking of food. Theoretically fever patients should eat as abundantly as laborers; practically this is impossible of accomplishment in most cases because of the depressed condition of mind and body of the patient. In some particularly wasting diseases, like typhoid, feeding has been carried on with some degree of success. The old practice with regard to fevers was to restore the patient to comfort as quickly as possible by getting rid of the fever, that is, by lowering his temperature to normal; at the present time the tendency in medicine is not so much to strive with the result of the poisoning as to seek to rid the body as quickly as possible of the poison and of its source. For that reason modern physicians are much less concerned with the degree of fever shown by the patient than with the extent to which the poisons in his body are being controlled or are becoming masters. In all our discussion of the regulation of body temperature it is important to remember that our feelings of cold or of warmth depend altogether on the temperature of the outermost one-quarter inch of our body surface. No matter how cold or how warm we may feel, as soon as we get to that depth below the surface, we find the body temperature the same, namely 98½ degrees. We feel cold when the skin is cool; the skin is cool because not much blood is flowing through it; the stimulation of the surrounding cold on the skin has aroused reflex vasoconstriction and so diverted the blood out of the skin into other parts of the body. This means that the mechanism for preventing loss of heat is working as effectively as it can and, therefore, that the heat which the body produces is being conserved. Experience shows that in reality the feeling of cold is very largely a matter of the condition of the extremities. If the hands and feet are warm, one rarely finds the cold uncomfortable; on the other hand, cold extremities produce a very general feeling of discomfort, even though the rest of the body may be warm. The lesson to be drawn from this is to pay particular attention to keeping the extremities warm. Where workmen are standing on a floor it is much more important that the floor be warm than that the air of the room as a whole be so. Of course, it must not be cold enough to allow the fingers to be chilled and stiff where manual work is being done, but it has been found that a considerably lower factory temperature is endured when the floors are warm than when the floors are cold.