Why Wagner-Jauregg won the Nobel Prize for discovering malaria therapy for General Paresis of the Insane

of only two Nobel prizes ever given to a psychiatrist for his discovery of the malaria treatment of general paresis. Compared to his contemporary Sigmund Freud, Wagner-Jauregg’s name has almost disappeared from memory. ’ Recently, Andrew Scull has suggested that historians have passed over the malarial treatment, along with other somatic treatments, in what he refers to as an ’embarrassed silence’. Indeed, in the late twentieth century, the idea, as Scull describes it, of breeding ’colonies of malarial mosquitoes with which to infect tertiary syphilitics and so bum the offending parasites from their brains ’ seems more appropriate for moral censure than than universal acclamation.2 Our relative silence about malarial treatment may, however, have other sources than embarrassment. Twentieth-century psychiatrists have until recently been more interested in psychological treatments than in somatic ones; while historians like Scull have often been more interested in psychiatry’s failures than its successes. Moreover, diseases like general paresis and pelagrous dementia have been so nearly eradicated