Daily MOS: Treating Syphilis with… Malaria?!

A patient undergoing pyrotherapy. Source: wikimedia commons
A patient undergoing pyrotherapy. Source: wikimedia commons

The good old days are a thing that we romanticize because it’s entirely too easy to block out the horrifying stuff. Jello molded mayonnaise covered monstrosities passed for gourmet cooking somehow. Make fun of my avocado toast and cardamom latte and see if I care, boomers. Aspics and aspics only for you from now on.

Medicine is where I hope we’d reconsider how we perceive the bygone days of yore. Because when a delightful tumble in the sheets left you peeing funny, you might have to be deliberately infected with a deadly parasite for a chance of retaining brain function.

Today’s Moment of Science… love in a time of neurosyphilis.

The body has a variety of natural mechanisms to fight disease. The innate immune system can attack an invader and try to keep it at bay while more specialized antibodies are created, eventually tackling the beast and kicking it to the curb once and for all. Many symptoms that we suffer through while sick are part of our body’s defenses against a microbe. For example, one of our body’s best defense mechanisms is a simple, uncomfortable, fever.

What if you have a disease that a fever can kill but, for whatever reason, it doesn’t produce a fever?

Some guy thought “let’s give them a second, treatable disease that gives them a fever to kill the first disease.”

Pyrotherapy, meaning ‘fever therapy,’ did just that. It was mainly proliferated by Austrian physician Julius Wagner-Jauregg in the 1920s. Give them malaria from the parasite Plasmodium vivax (which was pathogenic but less dangerous than other Plasmodium species), maintain a fever for long enough to kill the syphilis, follow it with a quinine chaser, profit. It killed patients about 15% of the time, which was a lot better than a virtually certain chance of death or complete mental incapacitation from the neurosyphilis.

I don’t know what’s more fucked up about this, the fact that it happened, that it worked, or that for his malaria-spreading efforts he won the Nobel Prize for medicine in 1927.

The very next year, penicillin was invented by Alexander Fleming, which cut down drastically on the malaria-to-treat-syphilis racket.

This isn’t the story of a hero unfortunately. This is the story of a stopgap until they discovered penicillin, a dangerous one, albeit a small advancement that came with major risks and discomfort.

Wagner-Jauregg was also a literal fucking Nazi. As in actually applied to be a member of the Nazi party of Germany in the late 1930s, and was denied mainly because his first wife, from whom he’d been divorced for decades, had been Jewish. He was described as an enthusiastic Nazi before the Germans invaded Austria, along with becoming a staunch nationalist and anti-semite through the course of his life.

This has been your daily Moment of Science, reminding you science, much like people, is often defined by the sum of its blunders.

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About SciBabe 375 Articles
Yvette d'Entremont, aka SciBabe, is a chemist and writer living in North Hollywood with her roommate, their pack of dogs, and one SciKitten. She bakes a mean gluten free chocolate chip cookie and likes glitter more than is considered healthy for a woman past the age of seven.

3 Comments

    • “Delete me from your posts.” I don’t have a clue who you are, you insane narcissist.

      Using the word “boomer” is not bashing. You are a boomer. That’s just a statement of fact.

      Jesus Christ boomers up here proving the stereotype.

  1. Once again, thanks for showing us something forgotten (or never known) and important. So glad I discovered your ‘Like’ and ‘Share’ buttons).

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