Fever pitch

Evolutionary theorists have suggested that it is a mistake to lower the temperature of a fever because fever must have survival value, otherwise it wouldn’t have evolved as a response to infection in the first place.

Whatever the validity of this roundish, if not completely circular, argument, the author Graham Greene found another virtue in fever: it once persuaded him that life was worth living.

He was on his trek in 1935 through Liberia when he fell ill. The first edition of his book about it, Journey without Maps, had to be pulped because of a threat of a libel action brought by a colonial medical officer …