The Body Temperature Data

Download the body temperature data (plain text).

In a book published in 1868, the German physician Carl Reinhold August Wunderlich reported on the analysis of over one million temperature readings from 24,000 patients. Ignoring fluctuations due to time of day, Wunderlich reported that 37 degrees Celsius is the mean temperature of healthy adults.

A 1992 article from the Journal of the American Medical Association reported on a study to critically appraise Wunderlich’s result, which had stood as the standard for more than 100 years. The researchers in this article took measurements on 148 healthy men and women (122 males and 26 females). They found an average mean body temperature of 36.8 degrees Celsius.

The data from the 1992 article are not available, but in 1996 Allen Shoemaker published data with similar statistical properties, derived from the histogram in the Journal of the American Medical Association paper. Shoemaker’s data are 130 hypothetical body temperature readings for 65 males and 65 females. The data file TempData.txt contains Shoemaker’s 130 body temperatures, converted from degrees Fahrenheit to degrees Celsius.

Source: A.L. Shoemaker (1996). What’s Normal? – Temperature, Gender, and Heart Rate. Journal of Statistics Education 4(2).

Description of Shoemaker’s data (External link is no longer valid)

Shoemaker’s data (External link is no longer valid)