Back In The Late 1960s

a handy song came along,

to help people remember the human body's temperature, titled 98.6 and sung by Keith, above, and at 70 still going strong, well apparently the figure of 98.6°F (or 37°C) is wrong, well it was correct in 1851, when German doctor Carl Reinhold August Wunderlich found it to be the average armpit temperature of 25,000 patients, but nowadays things have changed, according to the recent paper: the average American now seems to run more than a degree F lower, Stanford University researchers looked at data from Civil War soldiers and veterans and two more recent cohorts to confirm that body temperatures among American men averaged around 98.6 degrees F back then but have steadily fallen over time and that temperatures among women have fallen as well. Their data find an average for men and women of 97.5 degrees F, senior author Julie Parsonnet states that the research suggests that in the process of altering our surroundings, we have also altered ourselves. She states that ““We’ve changed in height, weight—and we’re colder.” you can find more details at Scientific American, meanwhile I guess someone should ask Keith to perform a new song, but somehow 97.5 does not have the same ring to it!