In 1927 , the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicinewas awardedto a man for commit people malaria , making Julius Wagner - Jauregg one of only two shrink to gain a Nobel Prize .
Wagner - Jauregg was a professor of psychiatry and Director of the Neuro - Psychiatric Clinic at the University of Graz , Austria in 1917 , when he mark that some of his patient with palsy who were deemed insane showed remarkable recoveries following pyrexia . course , he began experiment on the rest of his patient role , as was the trend at the time .
He believed that by introducing a fever to these patients , he could perhaps palliate or bring around their symptom , as he had seen naturally in other affected role . The belief that fevers could cure or relieve mental malady went back centuries and was even used as a discussion . However , what Wagner - Jauregg came up with was a reliable way to introduce a fever to patient , and scientific validation that it works . After trialing several methods of inducing a pyrexia , include erysipelas — a relatively common bacterial infection of the skin — he settled on sure-enough , reliable malaria .
Malaria is no mild affair . death rate rates from the resulting pyrexia have beenestimated at between 3 and 20 per centum . However , the patients who he had observed making a retrieval were in a late degree of syphilis know asgeneral palsy , where the sexually - transmitted infection had round the brain , draw affected role unenrgetic and finally paralyzed , often resulting in death . For them , the risks of malaria , which would be treat with quinine , and monitored in hospital , were far less than reserve their condition to deteriorate .
Wagner - Jauregg had his first positively charged effect for the treatmentwithin the first class . Ssoon others begin treating syphilis with malaria , alsoseeing positive results .
The strain he chose , Plasmodium vivax , bring about a long , high fever in patients and was used for decades after his find . Malaria was used to fight syphilis until the 1950s , when syph began to be treated with penicillin .
