Julius Wagner-Jauregg

Julius Wagner-Jauregg (1857 to 1940) was an Austrian physician who won the 1927 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine for discovering the therapeutic value of malaria inoculation in the treatment of dementia paralytica, and he was the first psychiatrist to receive the prize. Born Julius Wagner in Wels, Upper Austria, he studied medicine at the University of Vienna from 1874 to 1880, worked in the psychiatric clinic under Maximilian Leidesdorf, and in 1889 succeeded Richard von Krafft-Ebing at the Neuro-Psychiatric Clinic of the University of Graz, where he also researched goitre, cretinism and iodine. In 1893 he became professor and director of the clinic for psychiatry and nervous diseases in Vienna. His main work was pyrotherapy, the treatment of mental disease by inducing fever; after earlier attempts with streptococci and tuberculin, he inoculated patients with malaria parasites from 1917, and the method was used against neurosyphilis until the 1940s, although it killed about 15 percent of patients and is no longer used. His record is contested: an inquest examined his use of electric shock on soldiers, and he advocated forced sterilization and eugenics and sympathized with Nazism after 1938. He retired in 1928 and died in 1940.