350 READINGS IN BIOLOGICAL SCIENCE 



with the discovery by Schaudinn of the pale spirochete bacterium which 

 showed its spiral form in every syphilitic, began the search for this organism 

 in the brains of paretics. Perhaps it was this microscopic invader which was 

 sending its host to a paretic death. And while thousands of paretics died of 

 emaciation, with bed sores exuding daily pints of pus from the back of 

 their heads to their heels, only one persistent man searched unrelentingly 

 for the spirochete in paretics. 



Hideyo Noguchi, who knew more about spirochetes than anyone else 

 alive, had carefully examined one night a lot of two hundred slides of 

 paretic brain material stained for spirochetes. In the early morning he 

 had detected what he thought were spiral organisms in seven slides. He 

 would not trust his eyes and rushed to the home of Simon Flexner for con- 

 firmation. This discovery proved a landmark in the study of paresis. The 

 organism responsible for syphilis sometimes reached the brain and, lodging 

 there, changed its victim into a paretic. 



These facts accounted for a phenomenon that a Viennese physician, 

 JuHus Wagner-Jauregg, noticed while treating soldiers during the Italian 

 campaign of the first World War. Syphilitics, after getting over an attack 

 of malaria, showed a milder form of the "social disease." Paretics, on recov- 

 ering from some infectious disease, had long been known occasionally to 

 improve considerably. Wagner-Jauregg reasoned that the spirochete, 

 which could not endure high temperatures, might have been killed off by 

 fever, thus reducing the virulence of the disease. Perhaps this was the ex- 

 planation of the occasional cure of feverish paretics from whose chest 

 laudable pus had been forced. The infection which produced the pus 

 brought on the fever. 



Wagner-Jauregg was almost sixty at the time. He had seen an army of 

 paretics die in asylums. He was going to test out a hunch. Surely there was 

 nothing to lose. Into the veins of two men crazed by the spirochete of 

 syphilis, he injected two cubic centimeters of the blood of a shell-shocked 

 malarial patient. Then he waited for the fever to burn out those bacteria. 

 It was frankly a dangerous experiment. His patients might succumb to 

 malaria. The fever rose and almost burned out their lives. But they re- 

 covered from the malarial attack, their memories returned, they became 

 less irritable, and with frequent doses of salvarsan the symptoms of paresis 

 never reappeared. The fever attack on paresis has become a standard prac- 

 tice in mental hospitals. 



Research men have been driven into other channels of investigation. The 

 most recent attempt to explain and treat mental disorders from the view- 

 point of abnormal physiology is with the data and tools of glandular in- 

 vestigations. As far back as 1881 Kraepelin had fought insanity by intro- 

 ducing extracts of every possible gland of thyroid, testes, ovaries, and so 

 on, but unfortunately without effect. When later, however, cretins, hopeless 

 humans disabled in both body and mind, responded miraculously to treat- 



