Old-school medicine

In the TV show House, Dr. Gregory House regularly pushes his patients to the brink of death in various ways, always as part of some crazy high-risk scheme to save their lives.

Biomedically savvy viewers may dismiss these scenarios as unrealistic, but yesterday I came across this historical note while skimming Microbiology in Action by Heritage, Evans, and Killington:

One old cure for syphilis, used before penicillin became widely available, was to give the patient malaria. This causes regular, predictable bouts of fever. Treponema pallidum [the bacterium that causes syphilis] cannot tolerate repeated fevers.

Can’t you imagine House doing this? I can almost hear him saying to his team, “C’mon, you guys — penicillin is expensive, but malaria is FREE!”