Julius Wagner-Jauregg (German: [ˈjuːli̯ʊs ˈvaːɡnɐ ˈjaʊʁɛk]; 7 March 1857 – 27 September 1940) was an Austrian physician, who won the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine in 1927, and is the first psychiatrist to have done so.

In 1889 he succeeded the famous Richard von Krafft-Ebing at the Neuro-Psychiatric Clinic of the University of Graz, and started his research on Goitre, cretinism and iodine.

[4] The main work pursued by Wagner-Jauregg throughout his life was related to the treatment of mental disease by inducing a fever, an approach known as pyrotherapy.

In 1887 he investigated the effects of febrile diseases on psychoses, making use of the streptococci that cause erysipelas and tuberculin (the latter discovered in 1890 by Robert Koch).

Since these methods of treatment did not work very well, he tried in 1917 the inoculation of malaria parasites, which proved to be very successful in the case of dementia paralytica (also called general paresis of the insane), caused by neurosyphilis, at that time a terminal disease.

Thus, from 1917 to the mid 1940s, malaria induced by the least aggressive parasite, Plasmodium vivax, was used as treatment for tertiary syphilis because it produced prolonged and high fevers (a form of pyrotherapy).

Wagner-Jauregg administered thyroid and ovarian preparations to young psychotic patients who had experienced delayed puberty, which led to the development of their secondary sexual characteristics and diminished psychosis.

[10][11][12][13] However, a denazification commission in Austria found that his application for NSDAP membership had been refused "...on grounds of race", as his first wife Balbine Frumkin was Jewish.