Before the advent of antibiotics, syphilis was one of the most common infections in the Western World, afflicting up to 10% of the adult populations. In 1927 Julius Wagner-Jauregg was given the first and only Nobel Prize awarded to a psychiatrist. This was for work done in 1917 in which Wagner-Jauregg had exposed three neurosyphilitic patients to malaria drawn from the blood of a wounded soldier. The resulting high fever killed the syphilis bacterium, leading to their recovery! Given that there were few cures for anything in 1917, Wagner-Jauregg’s achievement was a milestone in psychiatric and medical science. There was now a reliable, albeit risky, cure for neurosyphilis. When I went to med school there was a saying: “To know syphilis is to know medicine,” […] Read More