Random factoid

[pne]

The things you learn when reading Wikipedia...

Apparently, for a while, giving someone malaria was used to treat syphilis—doctors had observed that in some patients, a high fever enabled the patient to recover from syphilis, and malaria leads to long and high fevers.

The risk was considered acceptable because malaria was treatable with quinine, which was available, while there were no effective direct cures for syphilis at the time (especially for later stages of the disease).

So I guess that if you had syphilis, they'd give you malaria, then after you'd been in fever for "long enough", they'd give you quinine to get you off malaria. Whee. Sounds like tons of fun.

Comments

[pne.livejournal.com]

I didn't disable my @lj alias, but the address it forwarded to suddenly got misconfigured and decided to reject most of the email rather than processing and forwarding it, much to my annoyance when I checked my email this morning.

I've patched things up a little and while they're not perfect, mail to pne@livejournal.com should at least go through again for now. You can also use philip.newton@gmail.com and/or Philip.Newton@gmx.net, which are two of the addresses that the LJ email eventually used to get sent to.

Secret bunny mail is still down, unfortunately, so if you wanted to send something that relies on that, you're stuck.