Welcome to Morales. I'm Javier Zapata, with your statistical guide to the numbers in the news and in your body.

This week, the Tung's of Hell.

The Tung's of Hell are dull.

Dull is the triple Tung's of dull fat Cerberus who weasers at the gate.

Sylvia Plath, reading from her poem, Fever 103 degrees.

That's a high fever. 103 degrees Fahrenheit is over 39 degrees Celsius.

The kind of fever that'll have you ranting on about the three-headed hound of Hades

wheezing in your face. Your body's like a furnace. As it works to keep you alive,

it's constantly burning. If it puts out more or less heat than normal, it means something's wrong,

usually an infection. Temperatures one of the ways that doctors can tell the difference

between health and disease. I should know I've spent the last seven months recovering from a

debilitating viral infection. They all started with high fever, the Tung's of Hell.

So I want to learn more about the numbers inside my body's furnace.

There's a widely held concept of an adult's normal body temperature. Put it into a Google

search and you'll get the number 37 degrees Celsius. That's 98.6 degrees Fahrenheit.

And it's this 98.6 number that you'll find in school textbooks going back over a century.

It's the pub quiz answer, the figure people intuitively reach for. Why?

Turns out this number is based on the work of a German physician called Carl Wunderlich.

He wrote a book on body temperature in 1868. He wrote that when a human is in a normal condition,

the general temperature of the body is 98.6 degrees Fahrenheit. He also said that we're

cooler in the morning than in the afternoon, that women are slightly hotter than men,

and that doctors should see normal temperature as a range. Wunderlich defined 100.4 degrees Fahrenheit

...