Will the inside of one's mouth blister and burn at the same temperature as one's external skin?

No. I’m certain the skin in your mouth has a much lower tolerance to heat in regards to burning.
I’ve read about this before, but I’m damned if I can remember where.

@rob, I would have thought just the opposite? That the inside of the mouth is MORE sensitive then the skin and the reason is so that you don’t take the hot food down your esophagus and burn the esophagus or throat. Or hot food getting to the stomach and burning the lining there? I would think very hot food would do a heck of a lot MORE damage INSIDE your body then out, and mouth sensitivity is the way to prevent that?

Seriously?

Pour some hot coffee on your hands. Ow!

Now pour some in your mouth. Yum! Just right!

Obviously don’t go and pour the entire pot down…

I think about pizza burn, sometimes the cheese is so hot that it causes the roof of my mouth to blister. But I can touch that same cheese with my finger and won’t get a blister.

But I can’t find any reports to back this up.

@fireside, I’d be willing to bet that the hot lava cheese is deep inside and that the cheese you’re putting your finger on is much closer to the surrounding ambient temp.

The mucosae of the mouth (the “skin” on the inside of your mouth) has different surface properties than the rest of your skin, everything from cell architecture to heat diffusion properties, the fac that it’s also covered with it’s own lubricant helps to buffer the efect of direct heat and to avoid 1st and 2nd degree burns.. while these can happen there is a more varied physical barrier in the mucosae than what you can find on the outer skin which will suffer because of direct contact.

The fact that it is also exposed to higher temperature in it’s natural state (the surface of your outer skin is NOT exposed to 98º temperature on a 24 hour basis…) shows just how robust and heat resistance the mucosae is…. if you also take into account the ammount of heat trauma (coffee etc) and chemical agents (salsa, acids from foods… pH changes) that it can withstand… comparing the mucosae’s resistance to heat and chemical attack to that of the outer skin would be like comparing papier maché to a bullet proof vest.

aaaaaaaaaaaaand done.

The tissue damage is a function of time and temperature. There was a study that measured the temps of the coffee at various points in its journey through the mouth and how long it remained there:

“They used thermocouples to measure the temperatures at four locations inside the mouths of 18 coffee-drinkers while those coffee-drinkers drank hot coffee. One thermocouple was placed on the anterior dorsal surface of the tongue, near the tip. The others were situated to measure the bolus – the roiling slurp – of coffee as it passed through the mouth.

After all the measuring and analysing, they concluded that, probably, “during drinking, the bolus of hot coffee is not held in the mouth long enough to heat the epithelial surfaces sufficiently to cause pain or tissue damage”. source

Another source says that the mucosae have a richer, more rapid and shallower blood supply, which is more efficient at carrying away heat than the epidermal layers of skin.

I don’t know, ask the dude from the herpes commercials.