Immune: A Journey Into the Mysterious System That Keeps You Alive

by Philipp Dettmer

OK, let us talk about one of the weirdest Nobel Prizes for medicine and how upsetting the past was and how great the present is. Syphilis is a sexually transmitted disease caused by spirochetes bacteria. Its possible symptoms are horrible and creepy and if you want to have a bad time you should go look up some pictures online. One of the possible late stages of the disease is neurosyphilis, an infection of the central nervous system. Patients affected by it basically would usually suffer from meningitis and progressive brain damage. What made the experience even more unpleasant were mental problems, from dementia to schizophrenia, depression, mania, or delirium, all caused by the bacteria wreaking havoc. Ultimately it is fair to say that affected patients had a bad time and in the end they would die without doctors being able to help them, other than to try to alleviate their suffering. But they did observe that in some cases patients that suffered from unrelated, very high fevers would actually end up being healed. So naturally, a few doctors began experimenting with pyrotherapy, a version of treatment by causing fever, and began injecting syphilis patients with malaria. This sounds horrible at first but it was a pretty acceptable risk—the patients would die anyway and malaria could already be treated at the time. Malaria was a prime candidate because it caused high fevers over a long and sustained time and basically cooked out the syphilis bacteria that just could not st...