- 19th century psychiatrist
- Specialty was patients with severe neurosyphilis
- It was a fatal diagnosis then with no known treatment
Advent of “Malariotherapy”
- In patients with neurosyphilis, he noticed a pattern that patients who had the added misfortune of having prolonged fevers from an unrelated ailment tended to recover more
- In early 1900s, he began injecting patients with low-end strains of typhoid, malaria and smallpox to trigger fevers
- Eventually, he settled on a weak version of malaria.
- Why malaria? Because it could be countered effectively with quinine after a few days
- He reported that 6 in 10 syphilis patients treated with “malariotherapy” recovered, compared to around 3 in 10 patients left alone
Nobel Prize
- Won the nobel prize in 1927 for medicine
- The organization for nobel prizes noted that:
The main work that concerned Wagner-Jauregg throughout his working life was the endeavour to cure mental disease by inducing a fever.
Extra information
- Penicillin made malariotherapy obsolete later