37 °C became “normal” in 1851. Most of us are colder than that now.
In 1851, the German doctor Carl Wunderlich measured 25,000 patients in Leipzig, under the arm. His average, 37 °C, became the normal temperature. In 2020, Julie Parsonnet’s team at Stanford looked at 677,423 temperatures across 157 years: men born in the early 1800s were 0.59 °C warmer than men today. The drop shows up even inside one group, Civil War veterans, so it is not just old thermometers. In Bolivia, the Tsimane went from about 37.0 to about 36.5 °C in 16 years. Nobody knows the cause for sure: fewer infections, warmer homes and less hard work are possible reasons. Today’s average is about 36.6 °C. This is not medical advice: a fever is still a matter for a doctor.
Sources: Protsiv et al., eLife, 2020: · Gurven et al., Science Advances, 2020: · Obermeyer et al., BMJ, 2017:
Photo of Carl Wunderlich: Wilhelm Höffert, before 1877, public domain (Wikimedia Commons).
How it’s made: the drawings are animated in code (Remotion), no AI image or video generator. The narrator is an AI voice made with ElevenLabs (not a recording of a real person), and the music was generated with ElevenLabs too.
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