Madness and malaria--intersections and boundary blurring between psychiatry and tropical medicine in Hamburg

The object of this article is to point out and to discuss the significant intersections and boundary blurring between psychiatry and tropical medicine while treating malaria in the German "colonial metropolis" Hamburg. The focus of this study is the Hamburg asylum at Friedrichsberg and the Institute for Maritime and Tropical Diseases (Hamburg Tropical Institute). Under analysis are two groups of patients as well as the means with which their doctors treated them: 1. patients who have been sent back from the German colonies in Africa after mental disorders had been diagnosed, and 2. patients suffering from general paralysis and treated in Friedrichsberg after 1919 using the then newly developed malaria fever therapy (according to Wagner-Jauregg). The implementation of this latter led to an intensification of the cooperation between psychiatry and tropical medicine in Hamburg which prior to this had been only very sporadic.