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A Treatment for Neurosyphilis

This letter from 1930 describes a patient who was given a strain of malaria but had not shown any symptoms infection. To treat neurosyphilis, doctors induced fevers using malaria infected blood and the patient was carefully monitored for signs of malarial infection. RMHCL

Neurosyphilis is an advanced stage of syphilis, which attacks the nervous system causing paralysis and psychosis. Many historians believe that it was one of the factors in the rising number of patients in asylums at the turn of the century. At the time, it was most often diagnosed as General Paralysis of the Insane or Paresis. In 1917, Julius Wagner-Jaureeg discovered that neurosyphilis could be cured by inducing a malarial fever in his patients, which could then be treated with quinine. This discovery led to the testing of patients for syphilis at the former London Asylum that same year using the Wassermann test. In 1921, of 1131 patients tested, slightly over 10% were discovered to have syphilis. Without Wagner-Jaureegs discovery, those that tested positive could have faced the debilitating paralysis of the later stages of neurosyphilis, and eventually, many of them would have died. The malarial treatment of neurosyphilis was widespread by the 1930s, and continued to be used until the introduction of penicillin in the 1940s.