Wagner von Jauregg, Julius

   (pronounced [VAAG-ner] fon [YOW-Reg])

   (1857–1940)

   Initiator of the malarial-fever cure for neurosyphilis, Wagner was born in a small town in Upper Austria, into the family of a provincial bureaucrat. (His father, Adolf Johann Wagner, added the suffix "von Jauregg" after his ennoblement in 1883.) The name, however, is usually given simply as Wagner-Jauregg, or Wagner. In 1880, Wagner graduated in medicine from the University of Vienna, and after a brief period of training in internal medicine he became a resident (Assistent)—despite minimal interest in psychiatry— in the psychiatric clinic of the Vienna asylum under Leidesdorf. (See VIENNA.) Habilitated in psychiatry and nervous diseases in 1885, in 1889 he was called as Richard von Krafft-Ebing’s successor to the chair of psychiatry in Graz, then in 1893 received one of the psychiatry chairs in Vienna. In 1902, after Krafft-Ebing’s death, Wagner took over the psychiatry chair in the General Hospital (the two chairs—the asylum and the hospital—were unified in 1911). Wagner remained the professor of psychiatry in Vienna until his emeriting in 1928.

   In scientific terms, Wagner is remembered as one of the earliest researchers to revive the recommendation of thyroid preparations for the treatment of endemic cretinism, a common cause of mental retardation in those days. This was a subject of continuous interest to him from the beginning of his scientific career onward, because the inhabitants of the mountainous areas around Graz had diets chronically deficient in iodine. Of greater impact worldwide, in a series of articles in 1918–1919 in the Psychiatry and Neurology Weekly (Psychiatrisch-neurologische Wochenschrift), Wagner described the malarial-fever cure for neurosyphilis ("progressive paralysis") that he had initiated in 1917. (He had been experimenting with fever cures of various kinds for psychosis since 1887.) Neurosyphilis thus became the first treatable brain disease causing major psychiatric symptoms, and the fever-cure represents the beginning of the physical therapies in psychiatry. (See Convulsive Therapy: Chemical; Deep-Sleep Therapy; Electroconvulsive Therapy; Insulin Coma Therapy.) Wagner received a Nobel Prize for this work in 1927. He remained hostile to psychoanalysis all his life and drove increasing numbers of its adepts out of his clinic. Wagner blighted his historical reputation by permitting himself to be enrolled in the Nazi Party after the union of Austria with Hitler’s Germany in 1938.