Pyrotherapy

Pyrotherapy, also called artificial fever, is a method of treatment by raising the body temperature or sustaining an elevated body temperature using a fever, with the body typically maintained at about 41 degrees Celsius, 105 degrees Fahrenheit. Many diseases were treated by this method in the first half of the twentieth century. The technique reached its peak of sophistication with malariotherapy, in which Plasmodium vivax, a causative agent of malaria, was allowed to infect already ill patients to produce intense fever for therapeutic ends, controlling the infection with effective antimalarial drugs while maintaining the fever it caused to the detriment of other, then incurable infections such as late stage syphilis. This form of pyrotherapy was most famously used by the psychiatrist Julius Wagner-Jauregg, who won the Nobel Prize in Medicine in 1927 for developing the procedure to treat neurosyphilis.