Fever therapy
A treatment that tried to cure illness by deliberately giving the patient a high fever. Julius Wagner-Jauregg of Vienna began it in 1917 by infecting patients with general paresis with malaria.
Wagner-Jauregg noticed that some patients with general paresis improved after an infection with high fever, and in 1887 proposed using malaria, because malaria could be stopped with quinine. In 1917 he infected nine patients with malaria, and six showed a marked easing of their symptoms. In untreated patients, a tally of 1914 put the rate of improvement at 3.9 percent[1].
The fever went above 40 °C, and deaths during or just after the fever were not rare. Why it worked was not known; he believed it was not the high fever alone. He received the 1927 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine for the work[1]. Once penicillin, which acts on syphilis itself, came into wide use, the treatment was abandoned[2].
Related terms
- General paresisA disease caused by the syphilis organism entering the brain. Mental symptoms such as memory loss and delusions advance together with bodily ones such as slurred speech and tremor.
- SyphilisAn infection caused by a spiral-shaped bacterium, Treponema pallidum. It spreads mainly by sex and, after many years, can attack the brain and nerves.
Sources
- J. Wagner-Jauregg, “The Treatment of Dementia Paralytica by Malaria Inoculation,” Nobel Lecture, 13 December 1927; Nobel Lectures, Physiology or Medicine 1922–1941, Amsterdam: Elsevier (1965) (1927).
- M. Karamanou, I. Liappas, Ch. Antoniou, G. Androutsos, E. Lykouras, “Julius Wagner-Jauregg (1857–1940): Introducing fever therapy in the treatment of neurosyphilis,” Psychiatriki 24(3), 208–212 (2013).