No one who knew Dr. Julius Wagner Jareg ever called him kind.

A luthan distant was more like it.

He had a gaunt, unsmiling face with penetrating eyes and a handlebar mustache.

If he'd been a cowboy, his nickname would have been slim.

As a young doctor in 1880, he got rejected for several jobs in general medicine in Vienna.

So he reluctantly took a post in psychiatry, a total backwater field at that time.

In part, because psych wards then were truly dismal places.

Without modern drugs, psychiatrists had zero effective treatments for most maladies,

and most patients spent every day in shrieking horror.

One of the most disturbing problems was neurocifalus, syphilis of the brain.

We normally think about syphilis as a venereal disease.

But if left untreated syphilis can invade nearly every tissue in the body, including the brain.

And a neurocifalus was an especially cruel form of insanity.

It caused shaking seizures and paralysis, and it made people lose control of their bowels.

Every single person who caught it died horribly, quaking with fear, babbling mad, and smeared with their own filth.

Overall, neurocifalus accounted for 15% of all insanity cases.

And doctors tried everything they could to cure it, including several quack treatments.

Some drilled holes into people's skulls.

They applied flayed roosters and live frauds to the genitals.

People chewed gum laced with mercury, or wore mercury soaked underpants.

The wildest treatment involved sitting on a special toilet and lowering your genitals into the water for electric shops.

It didn't work, but people were that desperate.

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