Pyrotherapy (artificial fever) is a method of treatment by raising the
Nobel Prize for Medicine in 1927 for his elaboration of the procedure in treating neurosyphilitics.[2]
Use
malariotherapy, involved the introduction of Plasmodium vivaxmalaria via injection into patients with advanced stages of syphilis.[2] Advanced syphilitic infection can invade the brain causing neurosyphilis, affecting neural performance and function, which can in turn lead to general paresis of the insane (GPI), a severely debilitating mental disorder. Doing so induced high-grade (103 °F, 39.4 °C or above) fever that was easily sustainable to eradicate invading spirochaetal bacterium Treponema pallidum, the pathogen responsible for syphilitic infection.[2][3] Successive rounds of treatment were required to fully eradicate the infectious bacteria, while simultaneously using quinine to treat the malaria infection.[2] Management of the fevers was risky as malaria fevers can sometimes cause death, but syphilis was a proliferate and terminal disease at the time with no other viable treatment.[2] This procedure was used to treat syphilis until penicillin was found to be a safer, more effective measure in the 1940s.[3]
Soviet psychiatry. Against schizophrenia "Saprovitan" and "Pyrifer" were tried.[5]
Effectiveness
In 1921, Wagner-Jauregg reported impressive success and many other physicians attempting malaria induced pyrotherapy made similar claims.[6] Later analyses have shown this might not have been true since approximately 60% would relapse within 2 years and 3–20% died from the resulting fevers.[6] Significant consideration should be used here, as syphilis was considered deadly and without other treatment options pyrotherapy was used as a heroic measure.[citation needed]
Citations
^Natuurwetenschap & Techniek Magazine, October 2010.
Braslow, Joel T. (1997). Mental ills and bodily cures: Psychiatric treatment in the first half of the twentieth century. Berkeley: University of California Press.
