'At the ordinary quarterly meeting of the Medico-Psychological Association of Great Britain and Ireland, held on November 23rd at the Bethlem Royal Hospital, London...

...[1120-1121]...

Dr. Edward Wheeler Scripture said that there were on record undoubted cases in which general paralysis seemed for a time to have been cured, so as to enable the patients to return to their work; and although they afterwards relapsed the fact seemed to indicate the possibility of stopping the progressive paralysis. Attempts which had been made with mercury and salvarsan had not been encouraging. Tuberculin and mercury, used in the way described at the Buda-Pesth [sic] Congress in 1909, were said to have produced good results. The tuberculin treatment was a substitute for the method by which nature had been known occasionally to cure general paralysis, - namely, by adding a fever to the disease. Wagner-Juaregg, in 1917, inoculated nine cases with tertian malaria, and six of them showed favourable results, three being still at work more than four years afterwards and showing no signs of the disease. For the inoculation, blood was taken from the vein of an untreated patient during the fever, and of this 2 to 4 c.cm. were injected under the skin of the back of the next paralytic... The results had been very favourable, and the clinical signs of general paralysis were said to have often completely disappeared during the treatment. Incomplete cures with persistent marked abnormalities occurred in fourteen cases, the disease having endured for several years. Professor Wagner-Jauregg considered the malaria treatment was the best, but that where this could not be applied the tuberculin treatment was to be recommended. Emphasis was placed on the patients being treated if possible early in the disease, and Dr. Scripture described the method of making speech inscriptions, which served to reveal the earliest abnormalities of speech and present them in graphic form. The patient spoke into the mouthpiece of a wide tube leading to an apparatus which registered the puffs of air and the waves of speech on a drum these records were then studied under the microscope. The cases of general paralysis showed the most varied bulbar, cortical, and mental signs, and of all degrees of severity. One sign was never missing in general paralysis – namely, asaphia [sic] (lack of precision in regard to type). With the normal person there was no variation in his speech, in the relative energy of the explosives, etc., but in the general paralytic this uniformity was lacking. The absence of asaphia could not yet be asserted to be a proof of the absence of general paralysis, though it was highly probable.’ (1120-1121)