ABSTRACT
A burn threshold is the temperature of skin above which a superficial partial thickness burn would occur and below which it would not. The most notable attempts to determine burn threshold data for human skin
were carried out in the 1940s. Leach et al (1943) and Sevitt (1949) exposed anaesthetised guinea pigs and some rats with shaved backs to a heated brass cylinder at a number of temperatures. Henriques and Moritz (1947) conducted a series of experiments with anaethetised pigs and humans using flowing water across the skin. They plotted curves of average skin temperature, to produce a burn, against exposure time and provided the main source of data still used today. Siekmann (1989, 1990) used a thermesthesiometer (‘artificial finger’) to measure contact temperatures of heated discs on a range of materials. Using the data of Henriques and Moritz he then proposed burn thresholds in terms of surface temperatures of typical materials. This work was used in the development of a proposed European Standard PrEN 563 (1992).
