The definition of fever has not changed through the years in the medical literature, although there are controversies about its significance mostly if talking of fever occurring in children for whom it represents a huge matter of anxiety for both caregivers and even for pediatricians. The plethora of papers related to pediatric fever and the somany tips available for the diagnostic approach to febrile children have not tampered the perception of “fever” as a danger.1 Fever has a number of meanings, and different models of fever-related practices can be disclosed, such as a phobic approach that drives routine treatment of fever, a scientific approach that sees fever as a potentially useful adaptive response, and a scientific butmorepragmatic approach that recognizes fever potential benefits even if resulting in treatment anyway.2 The II century Roman physician Galen of Pergamon considered fever as a systemic disease in itself,3 and many centuries later, two Italian philosophers gave fever new concepts: Girolamo Fracastoro believed that fever was due to the transfer of small bodies from one individual to another, providing the first hypothesis of an infection as a cause of fever, while Tommaso Campanella did not consider fever as a disease, but a war against disease, a “self-regulating mechanism undertaken using a powerful inner force.”4 Many years have passed since then, and currently, we know that fever is themost ancient defensive response of the humanbody, tightly preserved throughmillions of years of natural selection in living beings. Considerable progress has been achieved in revealing the functional organization of the thermoregulatory network within the central nervous system, and indeed fever follows a resetting of the thermoregulatory center soon after the infection-induced release of endogenous pyrogens from blood cells, which interact with specialized receptors on or near thermosensitive neurons in the preoptic hypothalamus.5 It is now well established that prostaglandin E2 is the final mediator of fever, which by binding to its EP3 receptor subtype initiates a “rise of body temperature” by disinhibition of presympathetic neurons in the brain stem.6

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发烧何时，如何以及为什么使儿童成为人质？

多年来，医学文献中对于发烧的定义一直没有改变，尽管对于其重要性的争议主要在于，如果谈论发烧发生在儿童中，对于发烧者而言，发烧对护理人员乃至儿科医生都构成了极大的焦虑。大量与儿科发烧有关的论文和许多针对高热儿童的诊断方法可用的技巧并未影响对“发烧”危险的认识。1发烧具有多种含义，并且与发烧相关的各种模式可以公开了诸如驱散发热的常规治疗的恐惧疗法，将发热视为潜在有用的适应性反应的科学方法，以及即使无论如何导致治疗也认识到发热潜在益处的科学但实用主义的方法。