The tenth Law of
The House of God—the cult 1978 novel about medical internship—states, “
If you don’t take a temperature, you can’t find a fever.”1 As anesthesiologists, we have historically not been at the forefront of this law’s decidedly cynical tenet—namely to avoid actively searching for problems. Quite the opposite: anesthesiology in particular has been a specialty that throughout its history has seen the advent and introduction of an array of innovative “thermometers,” i.e., monitoring tools that aid real-time detection of untoward pathophysiologic states to make them amenable for rapid clinical decision-making. Arguably, the most notable examples include measuring blood oxygenation by oxygen electrodes and later by pulse oximetry,
2,
3 capnometry,
4 and anesthetic agent monitoring.
5 …