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.
[4] The method was developed by Austrian physician Julius Wagner-Jauregg in 1917 for the treatment of neurosyphilis for which he received the 1927 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine.
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][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]).