To clarify the question:
1. Why does our body raise the temperature so high to the point where neither we nor whatever is inside us can survive?
2. How does our body raise the temperature?
-Follow up question:
What is the highest temperature our body can achieve on it’s own?
In: Biology
It’s extremely rare for a fever to drive the human body temperature to its lethal limit outright, in fact most fevers barely break 102F.
Certainly the brain is capable of doing it, but it wouldn’t make evolutionary sense to have a lethal kill switch that turns on whenever we get sick. 107F and beyond is when brain damage is considered to begin, but an endogenously initiated fever won’t even come close to this in almost all cases.
As far as initiating a fever, it’s easy- your brain turns up the thermostat. As a result, your body thinks it’s cold since your core temperature of say, 98F is way below the new setpoint of 100F. So your body begins shivering, which generates a lot of waste heat from your large muscles contracting. This drives the temperature up.
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