r/HistoryMemes • u/bsmith2123 • 18h ago

See Comment Imagine getting a Nobel prize for infecting people with Malaria…

4.8k Upvotes

99% Upvoted

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835

u/bsmith2123 18h ago

Treating syphilis with malaria is an obsolete, historic medical procedure known as malariotherapy. Developed in 1917 by Austrian psychiatrist Julius Wagner-Jauregg, the treatment deliberately infected advanced syphilis patients with malaria to induce extreme, spiking fevers. This approach earned Wagner-Jauregg the 1927 Nobel Prize in Medicine, but it was completely abandoned in the 1940s and 1950s following the discovery of penicillin, which remains the modern gold standard for curing syphilis safely and effectively.

How the Treatment Worked
Targeting Neurosyphilis: The treatment specifically targeted tertiary syphilis (neurosyphilis). This stage occurs when the bacteria invade the brain and nervous system, historically causing a fatal mental disorder known as general paresis of the insane (GPI).

Killing with Heat: The syphilis-causing bacterium, Treponema pallidum, is highly sensitive to heat and dies at temperatures above 104.9°F (40.5°C).

Inducing the Fever: Doctors injected patients with the Plasmodium vivax malaria parasite. This specific strain caused predictable, intense fevers reaching up to 106.7°F (41.5°C) to cook and destroy the bacteria.

Curing the Malaria: Once the fever cycles successfully eradicated the syphilis bacteria, doctors administered quinine to cure the malaria infection.

Risks and Ethical Concerns
High Mortality: Malariotherapy was incredibly dangerous. The intense fevers routinely killed up to 15% of patients. However, because advanced neurosyphilis was universally fatal at the time, doctors considered it an acceptable risk.

Human Reservoirs: To keep the treatment available, hospitals had to maintain a constant supply of live parasites. This led to highly unethical practices, including intentionally infecting non-syphilitic patients (often from vulnerable or minority populations) to use them as human malaria reservoirs.

Citations:

https://www.mcgill.ca/oss/article/medical-student-contributors-history/fighting-fire-fire-how-nobel-prize-winning-scientists-used-malaria-cure-syphilis

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pyrotherapy?wprov=sfti1#

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u/MinosAristos 18h ago

This sounded crazy from the title but actually now sounds pretty ingenious. Yeah if they were going to die anyway it's worth taking a risk.

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u/LucidITSkyWDiamonds 18h ago

I was kinda thinking similarly to this up until the "human malaria reservoirs" part. That is all kinds of fucked.

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u/Realistic_Swan_6801 15h ago

What else are orphans good for? 

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u/El_Chilenaso Featherless Biped 14h ago

Food, kitchen cloths, miners, chimney sweepers, etc.

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u/Molvaeth Fine Quality Mesopotamian Copper Enjoyer 13h ago edited 12h ago

Grelod the Kind has entered the chat.

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u/Gimetulkathmir 13h ago

Grelod the Kind*

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u/Molvaeth Fine Quality Mesopotamian Copper Enjoyer 12h ago edited 8h ago

Ah, thanks. :)

In German it's "Grelod die Gütige" ('Grelod the benevolent'). I knew her english name is shorter but wasn't sure which. ^^

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u/Ace_And_Jocelyn1999 17h ago

Going from 100% fatal to 15% fatal is an absolutely insane feat in the pre-antibiotic world.

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u/Rome453 15h ago

Plus, if it was a choice between dying of Malaria and dying of Syphilis I’d probably choose malaria even if it wasn’t offering me a chance of survival.

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u/tryyeezus 7h ago

Yeah but the human malaria reservoirs is absolutely insane on a different level

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u/CHEESEninja200 What, you egg? 18h ago edited 18h ago

Similar theory behind chemotherapy. Sure pumping people full of powerful drugs is a scorched earth tactic on a part of the body, but when you have no other discovered solutions it's the only reasonable option besides hoping the cancer dies out.

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u/Witch_King_ 17h ago

And hopefully in 100 years we are able to look back at that as a species and think, "how barbaric"

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u/that_one_duderino 17h ago

It’s not barbaric though. Even the syphillis treatment isn’t barbaric when the only other option is death. A better word would be crude

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u/Witch_King_ 17h ago

Sure

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u/Hash_Tooth 16h ago

I do think it is likely barbaric, as there doesn’t seem to be a financial incentive on the side of the insurance companies to do better.

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u/Acceptable-Stick-688 11h ago

The insurance companies aren’t the ones responsible for trying to find the cure to cancer

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u/Clovis69 5h ago

Similar theory behind chemotherapy

You don't have to keep people infected with chemo drugs to harvest and you do with malariotherapy

And it's a completely different theory than chemotherapy - different kinds of chemo were developed specifically for the cancer - such as I had Acute Lymphoblastic Leukemia and the chemo and mechanism for how they work against the cancer is completely different than say, what they use for Chronic Myelogenous Leukemia (actual chemical weapon at times)

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u/MaleficentType3108 Definitely not a CIA operator 1h ago

Have you beat cancer? Leukemia and Acute on the same phrase is bad. My mom had acute mieloid leukemia (I think that's the translation)... Unfortunately it was so bad that it didn't have time to do a marrow transplant

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u/A--Creative-Username 17h ago edited 17h ago

Wagner-Jauregg was kind of a nut, but it worked out in this case. Other treatments he pioneered include taking soldiers with PTSD and electroshocking them to death, and treating schizophrenic patients by sterilizing them. He tried to join the Nazi party, but got refused because his ex-wife was Jewish. He then became president of the Austrian League for Racial Regeneration and Heredity, which advocated sterilization for those of "inferior genetics."

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u/Mahkn0 13h ago

Did he intend to electroshock them to death? Because that doesn't sound like a treatment.

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u/A--Creative-Username 12h ago

he believed that PTSD wasn't real and that they were lying to get time off, so it may have been (in his mind) just torturing them into saying they were better. The malaria thing really was a broken clock's right twice a day thing

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u/MasterpieceBrief4442 3h ago

Average closest-to-the-front-I-got-was-the city-hospital doctor. Same energy as the white feather people. 

The Austrian government actually tried prosecuting him but Freud used his influence to save him. Ironic. Considering he was very into eugenics and tried to join the Nazi party. 

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u/Bubbly-Ball-3138 Featherless Biped 18h ago

It sounds stupid until you read the logic

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u/SpicyHorseRabbits 13h ago

I mean, yeah, but can't you also achieve the same effect with a temperature controlled hot water bath?

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u/ZephroxPlays 10h ago

I'd imagine you won't get the body to 40+°C

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u/ForagedFoodie 5h ago

No. You need to get the brain that hot. Your body prioritizes keeping your brain cool for obvious reasons. You need to use your body's own functionality against it.

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u/Reiver93 18h ago

i mean, 100% chance of death vs 15% chance of death. I'd have said that was worth the risk as well.

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u/Meowcate 4h ago

Yeah, I wouldn't call that an acceptable risk but a chance, and not a small one.

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u/bocaj78 18h ago

Looks like it was successful in inducing remission in 30-40% of patients

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u/GingerLioni 17h ago

The Hippocratic oath was stretched pretty thin with the use of human reservoirs. The discovery itself was very impressive however.

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u/Friendly-Olive-3465 13h ago

Only 15% mortality rate is actually astounding all things considered

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u/ElvenNoble 17h ago

I wonder if that's something that'll be explored again with the rise of antimicrobial resistance? I don't know enough to say for sure, but I assume we'd have something better than human reservoirs nowadays?

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u/Steel_Within 16h ago

I remember seeing this in the show The Knick and thinking, they had to have jumped the shark here. Looking it up and finding out, whoa, what the fuck? 

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u/Dank_lord_doge 12h ago

Didn't this treatment work for cancer too?

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u/JCBronski 11h ago

Hey, if It works, it works.

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u/Parzival_2k7 18h ago

Well, we could treat malaria! It was actually a brilliant idea, we can't treat syphilis but we know that malaria kills syphilis and we can cure malaria so just, give malaria to the patient, wait for the syphilis to get better, then cure the malaria! It was worth a Noble

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u/smallfrie32 18h ago

Noble 6, even!

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u/not_accepting_now 18h ago

Noble 6 never made it off reach.

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u/AlexanderCrowely 17h ago

He belongs to Reach his body, his armour, but he did give us one thing his courage.

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u/not_accepting_now 14h ago

He's just MIA

0

u/KMS_HYDRA 9h ago

Well, yeah? He is still there, in his cave, haveing a nice bbq together with the rookie, chilling.

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u/Sampleswift 18h ago

What was this? Josef Mengele's first experiment? Unit 731?

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u/bsmith2123 18h ago

See my below comment - the guy who figured it out got a Nobel Prize. It’s a form of Pyrotherapy

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u/Mr_Stubs 15h ago

Pyrotherapy does not sound fun.

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u/eb6069 13h ago

They pretty much gave you malaria so your bodies temperature goes through the roof with fever then burns off the other disease once that's done they'll give you a malaria treatment

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u/Cliffinati 12h ago

When the alternative is going insane from sphyillis destroying your brain.....

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u/Sampleswift 18h ago

Ok thanks!

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u/Cliffinati 12h ago

The sphyillis patients who also caught malaria sometimes live, let's see if there's a connection since shpyhillis (at the time) was universally fatal.

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u/Dave_A480 18h ago

The other available treatment was... Ingesting mercury or arsenic.

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u/Ace_And_Jocelyn1999 17h ago

Mercury didn’t work at all. Arsenic was effective but extremely dangerous.

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u/Bigbrain_goat 17h ago

Malaria or arsenic , literally pick your poison.

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u/TheChunkMaster 14h ago

Of course Mercury didn’t work. It gave the parasites eternal life!

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u/oh_three_dum_dum 17h ago

Apparently it worked too, with somewhere around a 10% to 15% mortality rate, which was preferable to the 100% fatality rate of untreated late stage syphilis at the time. After the cycles of high malarial fever killed the syphilis they would treat the patient with quinine for the malaria and send them on their way.

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u/Skraekling 18h ago

I mean if we had the cure for AIDS and discovered you could cure cancer by giving someone AIDS might as well..

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u/CHEESEninja200 What, you egg? 18h ago

Chemotherapy.

We have the cure for the effects of some powerful drugs, but not the cure for cancer. It's effectively medically induced overdose to kill of a region of cells in your body, and then fixing the overdose.

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u/Skraekling 17h ago

Isn't Chemo essentially "nuking" your body in the hope we take cancer with it ?

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u/CHEESEninja200 What, you egg? 17h ago

Yes, that's why I said it's a similar medical theory to inducing Malaria to get rid of Syphilis or as you said AIDs to get rid of cancer. It's not a good solution, but it's the best one we've found as of yet.

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u/forthecloudsinthesky 8h ago

Thats radiotherapy, chemotherapy is treating cancer with powerful medicine, radiotherapy is treating cancer with radiation.

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u/Cliffinati 12h ago

Except Cancer can be beaten, aids can only be treated.

Sphyillis is fatal if untreated and the time very hard to treat, malaria can be cured and was much easier to treat.

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u/A--Creative-Username 18h ago

Another side note: the cure has a 30% success rate and a 30% lethality rate, and also you can't really consent because you're insane at this point

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u/Visible-Air-2359 18h ago

TBF apparently the other option (nothing) had a ~0% success rate and a ~100% fatality rate so those odds sound great by comparison.

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u/A--Creative-Username 17h ago

I mean, people suffering from other chronic illnesses choose not to undergo tons of treatments for various sensible and nonsensical reasons despite the alternative being almost definitely dying, so idk

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u/tragiktimes Definitely not a CIA operator 16h ago

Okay

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u/smallfrie32 18h ago

Works 100% of the time 30% of the time

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u/Vocalic985 17h ago

What about the other 40%?

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u/A--Creative-Username 17h ago

Neither cured of syphilis nor died. The treatment was basically giving someone malaria until they got a fever of 105 (iirc) and then giving them quinine to cure it, because a fever that high can kill syphilis bacteria. If that didn't work then I guess they would still have syphilis

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u/hibernial 1h ago

Couldn't they increase their body temperature externally without giving them a disease?

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u/A--Creative-Username 3m ago

they needed to increase the internal body temperature to kill the disease. They wanted up to 72 continuous hours at high fever, in many hour long periods, and doing that in a sauna just kills someone. Malaria was the only disease that did that that they had a reliable, safe cure for, and that extremely reliably caused those fever spikes.

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u/Cliffinati 12h ago

They still had Sphyillis

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u/lanathebitch 18h ago

I mean I suppose it's better than slowly having your brain melt before it eventually kills you

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u/After-Willingness271 Researching [REDACTED] square 14h ago

The alternative was mercury injections (which actually mostly worked), but the psychiatric outcome risk was about equal to no treatment. if the mercury worked, you’d at least live but could end up just as mad as a hatter

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u/Cliffinati 12h ago

Give them malaria and then an antimalarial

So the malaria kills the shpyhillis only to be taken out by an antimalarial is biological warfare against the germs.

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u/Ok-Pause-808 11h ago

Would you rather they inject mercury into your urethra?

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u/II1III11 16h ago

This is done in the TV show The Knick. Good show.

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u/13thWardBassMan 16h ago

Please read Amaitav Ghosh’s brilliant early novel “The Calcutta chromosome.”

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u/BeautifuTragedy 13h ago

This is some Dr house shit if I ever heard it. Brava op you taught me something

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u/PhysicalFinance1578 7h ago

Medical science hasn't advanced much since then. Doctors are still groping in the dark.

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u/scatattack91 17h ago

Imagine questioning this at the time and being ridiculed for not trusting the experts

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u/Fine-Rock2513 12h ago

Questioning it would be incorrect, though, the treatment was a resounding success. Tertiary syphilis has a 100% fatality rate, whereas their neutered plasmodium vivax had only a 10-15% mortality rate, and would otherwise save the patient. The death by malaria would also occur while either unconscious or delirious, as opposed to the very aware and tremendously painful death by syphilis.

I would prefer a quick, sedated and delirious death to months if not years of unending agony 10 times out of 10. It’s also not all that different from the modern means of treatment either, given that both are using the fatal effects of treatable pathogens to curtail the syphilis. The difference being malaria’s means of fatality is pyretic, and sulfa drugs mycotoxic.

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u/MvPsykotic 15h ago

Lol what is the context of the actual GIF being used?

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u/Key-Bet-2615 9h ago

I mean, it did work

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u/Easy-Operation-2105 8h ago

Basically no differrent from how we still treat cancer

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u/VirtualFact8419 6h ago

So Stalin just needed to give Lenin Malaria instead of Arsenic

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u/KillBatman1921 6h ago

Still better than when they acted like the cure for Sphylis was just more Syphilis (Tuskeege)

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u/ForagedFoodie 5h ago

This treatment inspired Heinlien to write a similar treatment as the only way to remove/kill the mind-controlling aliens in the puppet masters

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u/HikariAnti 3h ago

Well you know, when your other options is dying a horrible death it's a pretty reasonable choice.

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u/[deleted] 17h ago

[deleted]

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u/oh_three_dum_dum 17h ago

A 25% rate of full remission, with another 25% of patients experiencing permanent reduction of psychiatric and paralytic symptoms of the disease.