History has seen many weird medical procedures. Perhaps one of the weirdest, most shocking (and perhaps the most horrifying) medical procedures that history has ever seen is this one called "cerebral impaludation," which literally means “putting malaria into the brain”.
In this operation, which was performed on over 1,000 people in the 1930s, blood from a malaria-infected person was injected straight into the frontal lobes of the unfortunate patient.
Why would anyone even dream of such a procedure? The story goes back to 1918, when an Austrian doctor, Julius Wagner-Jauregg, discovered that a bout of malaria could produce improvement in patients with advanced syphilis infection of the brain. Neurosyphilis was otherwise incurable at that time, and led to inevitable dementia, psychosis and death.
Julius Wagner-Jauregg would eventually win a Nobel Prize for his risky but effective procedure. But he wasn’t the one who injected malaria into the brains of his patients. That procedure would soon be developed by the French scientist Maurice Ducosté.
More details about Ducosté’s study over at Discover Magazine.
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