Medicine: Nobel Prize

Through the wards of the General Hospital at Vienna, a tall, grey doctor proceeds. His shoulders are stooped from age and work. Behind him follow 20 to 30 other doctors. They have come from all countries to attend his clinic. Many are from the U. S., taking postgraduate work, for, although the U. S. has better laboratories than any abroad, Vienna maintains its prestige for clinical research.

The tall, old doctor stops at a patient slumped in a wheel chair. He lifts the patient’s dull face by the chin and turns to the visitors. The loose ends of his black string tie, which he always wears in a bow, flop about as he explains the case. “This man,” he says in effect, “is in the early stages of paresis.* The paralysis has not advanced hopelessly. By injecting into his blood the germs of malaria or serum from the blood of people sick with malaria, we will stop the spread of the syphilis. The malaria toxins, in some way not yet conclusively proved, counteract the toxins of syphilitic spirochetes. We have patients so treated who for ten years now have been able to live and work normally. Without this malaria treatment they probably would be insane or dead.”

The visitors know that the old doctor has been using fever-causing toxins ‘to treat paralysis since 1887; that since 1919 his malaria method has been in wide use.

The old man appears at the University of Vienna to lecture to classes in neurology and psychiatry. When he enters the lecture room the students salute him by standing. In a soft, kindly voice and with simple terms he explains that in paresis the spirochetes attack first the meninges (covering of the brain). Later they ulcerate the front lobes of the brain. Paralysis results. Attacks of malaria seem to cure the ulcers. A paretic patient can never be completely cured.

The students regret that their professor is 70 years old this year and by a University of Vienna rule must retire. Another rule allows him a year of grace.

The doctor-professor is Julius Wagner von Jauregg, who last week received the 1927 Nobel Prize in Medicine for his malaria treatment of paresis.

*Disease resulting from syphilis.