A Study of the Mechanism of Inoculation Malaria on the Histopathologic Changes in Paresis. (Journ. of Nerv. and Ment. Dis., March, 1928.) Bruetsch, W. L., and Bahr, M. A.

The favourable outcome of a considerable percentage of paretic patients who have been given malaria treatment has proved that inoculation-malaria is capable of influencing beneficially the progressing paretic process. Apart from the clinical and serological improvement there is a decrease in the death-rate compared with untreated cases. In addition, however, the histopathological changes in the paretic brain are also influenced by inoculation-malaria, since it can be shown that the remissions following malaria are accompanied by an arrest of the pathological processes in the brain, such an improvement not being found in spontaneous remissions. The benefit is not due only to rise of temperature. A case is described here who died at the height of a malarial paroxysm. It was found that the larger vessels in the brain were markedly dilated and the endothelial cells showed marked proliferation specially in the minute capillaries. The same proliferative activity was also seen in the reticulum cells of the spleen, the Kupffer stellate cells of the liver, and the group of phagocytic cells in the connective tissue. All these cells form the reticuloendothelial system, and in acute malaria they undergo intense proliferation) obviously part of the defence mechanism of the body against the invading malarial plasmodia. The reaction of this reticuloendothelial system is as intensive as in typhoid fever, following which disease similar good remissions of general paralysis have been frequently