Julius Wagner-Jauregg

Julius Wagner-Jauregg was an Austrian psychiatrist and neurologist who developed malaria fever therapy for neurosyphilis and received the 1927 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine.

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Malaria therapy: A treatment that deliberately induces malaria infection to provoke fever, historically used against certain diseases. Wagner-Jauregg developed this method to treat neurosyphilis.
Richard von Krafft-Ebing: An Austrian psychiatrist known for influential late nineteenth-century writings on sexual behavior and mental illness. He preceded Wagner-Jauregg in the Vienna psychiatric tradition.
Syphilis: A sexually transmitted infection caused by the bacterium Treponema pallidum. Neurosyphilis is a late manifestation of this infection.
Malaria: A potentially fatal disease caused by Plasmodium parasites transmitted through infected Anopheles mosquitoes. Therapy depended on deliberately infecting patients with malaria, which itself could kill.
Neurosyphilis: Infection of the central nervous system by the bacterium that causes syphilis. This was the disease his malaria fever therapy targeted.
Constantin von Economo: An Austrian neurologist who described encephalitis lethargica and its characteristic sleep disturbances. He worked in Vienna's neurological milieu during Wagner-Jauregg's career.
Fever: A regulated rise in body temperature, usually as part of an immune response to infection or inflammation. Wagner-Jauregg reasoned that fever might suppress the disease causing progressive paralysis.
Quinine: A bitter alkaloid drug that has long been used to treat malaria. Clinicians used it to stop the induced malaria after fever therapy.
General paresis of the insane: A late-stage form of neurosyphilis marked by progressive cognitive, behavioral, and motor decline. This severe manifestation was a principal target of his treatment.
Sigmund Freud: An Austrian neurologist who founded psychoanalysis, a method and theory centered on unconscious mental processes. Freud and Wagner-Jauregg were prominent, sometimes opposing figures in Viennese psychiatry.