In malaria therapy, malarial parasites (Plasmodium) are specifically used to cause fever, and an elevated body temperature reduces the symptoms of or cure the diseases.
Hippocrates in the 4th century BCE recorded bacterial infections such as dysentery and dropsy reducing the symptoms of madness; and that malaria (quartan fever) could stop epileptic convulsions.
[8] It was, however, reported by J. Motschukoffsky in a German medical journal Centralblatt für die Medicinischen Wissenschaften,[9] but the underlying cause of how malaria cured psychosis was not understood, and Rosenblum's experiment remained unknown for several decades.
[11] The importance of the study was realised only in 1938 when Austrian physician Julius Wagner-Jauregg discussed the research at the International Neurological Congress in London.
[11][14] Wagner-Jauregg, working at the First Psychiatry Clinic at the Asylum of Lower Austria, investigated cases of brain disorders since 1883, publishing his first paper on psychosis in 1887 titled "Über die Einwirkung fieberhafter Erkrankungen auf Psychosen" ("The Effect of Feverish Disease on Psychoses").
[6] He soon realised that a severe type of psychosis was related to neurosyphilis, an infection of the central nervous system with syphilis (caused by a bacterium identified in 1905 as Spirochaeta pallida, later renamed Treponema pallidum[15]).