As with other ‘miraculous’ cures for mental illness, no one was able to shed much light on why it might work. A few years earlier, another equally bizarre physical treatment had been hailed as a cure for general paralysis of the insane (GPI), a severe mental disorder caused by late-stage syphilis. In 1917, Julius Wagner-Jauregg, an Austrian doctor, had injected blood taken from a malarial patient into two people suffering from GPI. He’d had a hunch that a spiking fever might be therapeutic in some cases of psychosis – the original shock treatment. Some signs of improvement were noted, and it
...more
