Understanding the Stoll Curve

Arc Alice Stoll and Maria Chianla conducted burn injury research on "sailors, pigs and rats" in the late 1950's and early 1960's at the Aerospace Medical Research Department, Naval Air Development Center. It is reported that Sailors of the U.S. Navy volunteered to be burned on their forearms for a weekend pass. Stoll and Chianta used heat exposures on human and animal skin to determine the level of heat energy that would create a second degree burn. For their work, they defined a second-degree burn as the point at which a blister forms which is the point at which the outer layer of human skin, the epidermis, is destroyed, The blister is formed when the epidermis separates and lifts off the remaining skin structure (the dermis). The Stoll and Chianta data was presented In a landmark paper In 1969 and was later used to create the "Stoll curve" which quantifies the level of heat and the duration of time required for a second-degree burn for a wide range of exposure conditions. The range covers a high level of heat for a short time period to a low level of heat for a much longer time period.

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