Feverish by Gigi Fenster

Author:Gigi Fenster
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Victoria University Press

Wagner-Jauregg was acquitted. He returned to work, and to the research he’d started before the war into treatment for the disease of the century, GPI.

Wagner-Jauregg had been experimenting for some decades with fever as a treatment for GPI. In 1883 he’d noticed that a female patient experienced a remission in her psychoses after contracting an acute skin infection accompanied by fever. In the years before the war he’d been experimenting with fever induced by tuberculin, supposedly a vaccine against tuberculosis. While the fevers induced by tuberculin appeared effective against GPI, the substance proved to be toxic and experiments using it were abandoned. Wagner-Jauregg then settled on malaria as a fever-inducing agent. Malaria had a number of advantages: the illness followed a predictable course, with one day of fever following two fever-free days. Malaria could be treated with quinine, and there was a lot of it about—soldiers had contracted it on the Balkan Front.

In 1917 a soldier suffering from malaria was admitted to one of Wagner-Jauregg’s wards for treatment for a small injury. In his later writing, Wagner-Jauregg described the scene thus:

‘Should he be given quinine?’ [my assistant Dr Alfred Fuchs] asked. I immediately said: ‘No.’ This I regarded as a sign of destiny. Because soldiers with malaria were usually not admitted to my wards, which accepted only cases suffering from a psychosis or patients with injuries to the central nervous system [. . .] I obtained during a paroxysm a small sample of the soldier’s blood, and I inoculated three general paralytic patients by rubbing a few drops into several superficial scarifications of the skin. Then the malaria of the soldier was stopped with quinine.

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