In 1927, Viennese psychiatrist Dr. Julius von Wagner-Jauregg won a Nobel Prize for his work with "fever therapy" which involved the injection of malaria-tainted blood to induce a fever which was thought to kill harmful pathogens. Ten years prior, he "cured" a patient with late-stage syphilis via this practice, which came to be considered a cure for psychotic and infectious diseases. 

 

As more doctors used Wagner-Jauregg's methods, the recognition that patients were dying prompted the idea that the "fever" was good but the method of inducing it was not.  Ultrasound became the new cure for bringing human temperature up to high levels. Full-body ultrasound machines (looking somewhat like iron lungs) were first used at  the Fifth Avenue Hospital in New York City in the 1930s. According to a press release at the time, the machine "heats the blood stream and body tissue, much as does nature, killing off the alien germ." 

 

Kettering hypertherm cabinets enclosed the patient in a supine position except for the head. Small sliding doors on the sides of the cabinet allowed access so that the physician or nurse could adjust protective blankets and measure blood pressure and temperature. After an hour's treatment, the patient's temperature was generally at the desired level of 40° to 41°C, and then the hypertherm was adjusted to maintain the body temperature at the desired level for about 5 hours. Patients were encouraged to sip iced 0.6 percent saline solution during treatment to prevent salt depletion.  However,  the failure to produce sustained improvement led to less use, and by the end of the 1930s fever therapy was seldom used except in occasional cases of reactive arthritis

 

In New Orleans this was done at the Marine Hospital on Tchoupitoulas Street between State and Henry Clay (later named the U.S. Public Health Service Hospital).  Pictured here is a patient undergoing this unique form of torture/cure there on  December 21, 1937.