Ignorance of the pathobiologic processes underlying schizophrenia renders therapy of the etiologic factors as yet impossible. There are, however, accidentally discovered correlations which may form the starting point of therapeutic efforts, as in the case of dementia paralytica, in which remissions coinciding with accidental fevers led to the establishment of a biologic antagonism between the disease process and the febrile condition and thus to malarial therapy. Fever therapy has been applied also in cases of schizophrenia, but without results worth mentioning, owing, according to my conception, to the absence of a biologic antagonism between fevers and schizophrenia. My task was, then, to look for probable biologic antagonists of schizophrenia. Observations in this direction had been made before, without, however, being systematized and utilized for conclusions regarding therapy.
In 1929 Nyirö and Jablonszky published observations made on the epileptic patients of the Budapest-Lipótmezö Mental Hospital. They were struck by the fact