The body and its ailments: a handbook of familiar directions for care and medical aid in the more usual complaints and injuries . latent or hidden; while the other]can be detected by the touch and measured jby the thermometer. But a gas or vapor jhas many (almost seven hundred) times asjmuch latent or hidden heat as a fluid, hence,when the water of the perspiration is*poured out upon the skin and becomes?vapor, it absorbs heat from the skin andblood, and so cools us off. When we are quiet the skin has little moisture upon it, but whenwe exert ourselves violently the water trickles from the sur
The body and its ailments: a handbook of familiar directions for care and medical aid in the more usual complaints and injuries . latent or hidden; while the other]can be detected by the touch and measured jby the thermometer. But a gas or vapor jhas many (almost seven hundred) times asjmuch latent or hidden heat as a fluid, hence,when the water of the perspiration is*poured out upon the skin and becomes?vapor, it absorbs heat from the skin andblood, and so cools us off. When we are quiet the skin has little moisture upon it, but whenwe exert ourselves violently the water trickles from the surface, andby its evaporation, rids us of unnecessary heat. We are thus en-abled, also, to resist unnaturally high temperatures, as well as verylow ones. So long as the air be dry very great heat can be some trades workmen enter furnaces the air of which has atemperature of a hundred and fifty degrees above that which boilswater. Under these circumstances the sweat glands are stimulatedto extraordinary activity, and pour out a large quantity of waterupon the skin, which quickly evaporates, and so cools down the body. Section of Skin. 28 Structure and Actio?i of the Body. to the natural temperature. If, however, the air be moist insteadof dry, and if sweating be in any way interfered with, the bodysoon becomes unnaturally warm, and death results if the exposurebe long continued. The process of perspiration goes on without our aid or will, butis effected by variations in the temperature, by exercise, by variousnervous conditions, such as anxiety, excitement, irritation or Jassi-tude, and may be controlled, to a great extent, by the amount ofclothing we wear, or of the fuel we put in our stoves. The totalnumber of sweat pores reaches the enormous sum of seven millions,and the total length of the sweat tubes of the body is nearlytwenty-eight miles. This vast array of tubes and pores not only serves to regulate thetemperature of the body, as we have just explained, but also t
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