From 1917 through the mid-1940s, tertiary syphilis was treated by intentionally infecting the patient with malaria. The malaria would provoke a sustained high fever which essentially cooked the syphilis spirochete. The malaria would thereafter be treated with quinine. A 15% mortality rate and the introduction of new antibiotics against syphilis led to the abandonment of this regime.
The author of this procedure, Dr. Julius Wagner-Jauregg, received the Nobel Prize for Medicine in 1927 as a result.
On a side note, Wagner-Jauregg also believed that "excessive masturbation" was a symptom of schizophrenia, and he treated those who were so afflicted by sterilization.
During WWI, he was angered by German soldiers who claimed to be too mentally upset to return to the battlefield. He treated these individuals with "extreme electric shock therapy," which killed large numbers of them. It took the intervention of Sigmund Freud to convince the post-war German government not to prosecute Wagner-Jauregg criminally.
Notwithstanding the fact that his wife was Jewish, the doctor became a devout Nazi until his death in 1940. Ironically, because his wife was Jewish, his application for membership in the Nazi Party was denied.
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