Welcome to the fifth instalment in the True Tales of Medical Horror series. This is, like the fourth instalment, something of an addendum.However, unlike the fourth instalment, this go round I have reverted back to proper form in order to tell another obscure story from the historical record of medical science.
This particular tale dovetails with each of the first three instalments as well as my series on The History Of Vaccine Science And The Language Used To Describe It. So many things we consider past madnesses departed from long ago for a brighter future are still reverberating and more interconnected with current events and practices than most folks realize.
So, sharpen up your number two pencils, Moonbats! We're going to review a few things on our way to Curing The Great Pox. Let's get medically historical!
As we learned in the second instalment of this series, "The Great Pox" is another name for syphilis.
Do you ever wonder why they don't refer to syphilis as a "Pox" anymore? Was it to "destigmatize" the illness for the afflicted to feel more comfortable, as has been done with the renaming of Monkeypox?
Did we drop the "Pox" so that people would stop calling it the "French Pox"? Don't be silly, it was the French who called it 'grande verole', which translates to 'great pox’.
Well in the second and third parts of A History Of Vaccination Science And The Language Used To Describe It, we learned that the names of things are often changed. These alterations to the lexicon render historical research ever more difficult with each new iteration. Perhaps it's intentional? Dare we think to suspect something conspiratorial?
Alright, we're not going there. We're going back to the dictionary before we see a doctor about a thing.
According to the Miriam Webster online dictionary, usage of the word syphilis was first recorded in 1653, but the omniscient editors at Wikipedia dispute that date with a bold claim of 1530. Some have alleged that Columbus had brought the Great Pox back to Europe with him in 1495, though, according to Wikipedia, the first reports of syphilis in Europe were recorded in 1494. Whenever and whatever the origins of the affliction may be, Miriam Webster won't tell you that the term "Great Pox" predates the term "syphilis".
According to Laura Bowater, writing for Microbiology Today Magazine,
Today we know this disease as syphilis thanks to Girolamo Fracastoro, the famous 16th century mathematician, physician and poet from Verona, who described a dreadful plague sent by a vengeful sun god to strike down the mythical shepherd Syphilis in his poem Syphilis sive morbus gallicus. This name has stuck to this day.
That doesn't sound like a scientific reason for changing the name.
According to John Frith writing in the Journal of Military and Veterans Health
Syphilis had a variety of names, usually people naming it after an enemy or a country they thought responsible for it. The French called it the ‘Neapolitan disease’, the ‘disease of Naples’ or the ‘Spanish disease’, and later grande verole or grosse verole, the ‘ great pox’, the English and Italians called it the ‘French disease’, the ‘Gallic disease’, the ‘morbus Gallicus’, or the ‘French pox’, the Germans called it the ‘French evil’, the Scottish called it the ‘grandgore‘, the Russians called it the ‘Polish disease’, the Polish and the Persians called it the ‘Turkish disease’, the Turkish called it the ‘Christian disease’, the Tahitians called it the ‘British disease’, in India it was called the ‘Portuguese disease’, in Japan it was called the ‘Chinese pox’, and there are some references to it being called the ‘Persian fire’.
So the origins of the Great Pox may be irretrievably lost in confusion. That's not the purpose of this particular exploration, I just got on a tangent about the names of things. Pardon the divergence.
I intend to talk about the search for the cure for the Great Pox. Although penicillin may pop up in your mind, and is correctly the cure, that comes much later. There were many horrors along the way to penicillin.
For example, one of the earliest recorded treatments was the burning of the sores with hot metal or caustic chemicals.
According to A. M. Sefton writing in the Journal of Applied Microbiology
Early therapies for ‘the Great Pox’ were both painful and ineffective. They included burning the sores with hot irons, anointing the lesions and other parts of the body with ointments – these usually contained mercury as one of their main components, heat treatment, mercury by mouth (and later by injection) and arsenicals.
The mercury treatment often had the obvious side effect of causing mercury poisoning. In a high enough dosage, the mercury could kill off the syphilis but it also killed off the patient. Even if the patient were fortunate enough to survive and avoid neurological damage from the syphilis, they were neurologically damaged by the mercury.
It's certainly interesting that mercury went from being injected to treat syphilis on to be included in vaccines as a preservative under the name Thimerosal. We can circle back to that some other time. We're still chasing down the cure for the Great Pox.
Those arsenicals mentioned are a series of concoctions called arsphenamine, first formulated in 1907 and tested successfully on rabbits, for which Paul Ehrlich was awarded a Nobel Prize in 1908. The formula was demonstrated to have anti-syphilitic effect on humans in 1909. Thus, in 1910, arsphenamine was marketed as a syphilis cure under the brand name Salvarsan.
As the active ingredient in Salvarsan is arsenic, it's not surprising that liver damage and death were among the documented side effects. An attempt to address at least some of these concerns came with a revised version released under the name Neosalvarsan in 1912. The dirty secret is that the arsenical compound was more effective when it had mercury mixed in.
There were also treatments developed from iodine and bismuth. Both of these formulas were also deemed more effective when mercury was added to the mix.
Well, when your choice is between toxic metals and toxic metals, where do you go? You go crazy with a fever! So hot, we're talking Nobel Prize winning crazy!
Here's where we introduce our mad scientist of the day.
Julius Wagner-Jauregg (1857-1940) was an Austrian psychiatrist who became a big shot for a short time by claiming to cure the Great Pox with the intentional infection of malaria to induce fever. For that he was the first psychiatrist to win a Nobel Prize. No kidding!
But, it gets even more crazy when you realize what he was doing that earned him the Nobel Prize. Not only was he inoculating his patients with the malaria parasite by intentionally allowing specifically bred malaria infected mosquitoes to feast on their blood, but also by the injection of blood from other infected patients.
OK, to be fair, he didn't just jump from being a psychiatrist to injecting everyone with someone else's blood.
According to Cynthia J. Tsay writing in the Yale Journal of Biology and Medicine
In 1883, shortly after starting his first psychiatry position at the clinic, he observed a woman being cured of severe psychosis after an attack of erysipelas, an acute bacterial skin infection typically accompanied by a high fever [9]. While he would not formally work on fever therapy until 1917, this early case stuck with Wagner-Jauregg. He began conducting literature searches on the topic and published an article, “The Effect of Feverish Disease on Psychoses,” in 1887 [10].
So, obviously it took him a while to go from the concept to the practice. Let's learn a little more about the practices of Dr Wagner-Jauregg.
Tsay goes on to quote Professor of Neurology Walter L. Bruetsch thusly:
It is true that Rosenblum inoculated a group of mental patients with relapsing fever, but he did not continue this mode of treatment and there was no fever therapy, as we know it today, until Wagner-Jauregg … The merit of Wagner-Jauregg was that he soon realized the beneficial effect of fever was restricted to cases of dementia paralytica. For over 20 years he then focused all his efforts on this type of mental illness, using tuberculin, typhoid vaccines and even streptococci of erysipelas to produce fever [21].
Why would he use typhoid vaccines to induce fever? Because, the vaccine could reliably induce fever as fever is one of the most common side effects of vaccination.
Vaccine induced fever leading to febrile seizure is a serious, though allegedly rare, adverse event, especially in regards to childhood vaccination. However, fever after vaccination is dismissed as a minor symptom of the immune challenge. Fever means that it's working!
Yes, fever is a common adverse reaction to the SARS-CoV-2 mRNA injections, also.
You can always find an expert to tell you that vaccine induced fever is actually good for you while a fever induced by any naturally occurring infection is definitely bad. Remember; natural immunity bad, engineered immunity good. Safe and effective. The Science is settled.
However, I won't settle for that here. Let's keep moving and get back to the blood work.
Again, according to Tsay
In 1917, Wagner-Jauregg received word from Dr. Alfred Fuchs that a soldier was suffering from tertian malaria, and he was asked if the patient should be administered quinine, which was the prevalent therapeutic for malaria during the time [23]. Wagner-Jauregg seized the opportunity and asked for a sample of the soldier’s blood, which he subsequently injected into nine of his GPI patients. Of the nine, one passed away, two were sent to asylums, and six demonstrated considerable improvement; however, four of these last six later suffered from relapses. Nonetheless, the two remaining patients made full recoveries and were able to return to their jobs and homes.
Two recovered and only one dead! Much success! Winning bigly!
I mean, sure... if you already have syphilis why not get a random soldier's blood injected into you? What could go wrong?
I mean, according to the new definition of "vaccine", this blood injection is a vaccine. And we all know that vaccines are always safe and effective. Always. Every time. Even when they aren't. Even when they spread the Great Pox.
Alright, so you don't want to be injected with malaria infected blood or a soup of toxic metals; what else was there?
Electric technology to the rescue! And, yes, more fever! Once you get the fever for the flavor, you've got to have more!
What's that, you ask? Well, pyrexia is another word for fever and electropyrexia is fever induced by an electrical device. Do you find this shocking?
Febrile! Pyrexia! Expand your vocabulary and never say 'fever' again! Yes, you too can act like a doctor and use uncommon language to describe common things to keep common people confused. Science!
Alright, I'm being a bit facetious but I'm not wanting to add to your confusion. The truth is that, technically, people weren't having the syphilis shocked out of them. Sorry, an electric cattle prod to the genitals isn't likely to cure your saddle nose, no matter how many times you try it. But, don't let me stop you.
Anyway, how was the fever induced? With radio waves.
Yes, radio waves.
A short wave radio transmitter was used to generate high frequency oscillations which, when directed at the subject, artificially induced pyrexia (fever).
Electropyrexia is also referred to as Short Wave Diathermy and Artificial Fever Therapy, but electropyrexia seems to be the preferred term for it's ability to confuse the uninitiated.
Now, here we find a seven year gap in the medical literature. The alleged success of electropyrexia was announced and introduced to the medical field at large in 1936, but apparently disappeared with the advent of penicillin in 1943.
Certainly there's more to the story.
Well, Moonbats, I feel that I have taken you as deeply down through the warren as we are able to reach today. The further in depth facts of electropyrexia will have to wait for another day to explore. I need to stop writing this and publish before its length becomes too intimidating for those who are only casually curious.
For you with the intellectual and intestinal fortitude to follow my rambling this far down this particular rabbit hole, I thank you and offer my congratulations.
Why did I drag you down this particular rabbit hole, anyway? Well, I don't know how much you read of medical news, but... for the last ten years at least there have been reports of evidence that the Great Pox is making a comeback.
Additionally, penicillin may have lost some of its punch through overuse leading to the development of antibiotic resistant strains. Yes, the new and improved even Greater Pox may be immune to penicillin.
So, we may need to seek out the cure once more.
Until then, Moonbats, stay away from those saddle nose hos. May your mind continue to expand farther and faster than your belly.
