Rethinking Depression

This is Hidden Brain, I'm Shankar Vedanta. For centuries, physicians regarded fever as a dangerous disease, an enemy to be crushed. In ancient and medieval medicine, fever was thought to represent an excess of heat or humor in the blood. A sign that the body's internal balance had gone dangerously askew. Treatments aimed to drive out the heat.

Patients were bled, purged, or doused with cold water, some were packed in ice, or fed diets designed to cool the blood. Well into the 19th century, fever was still widely feared as a destructive force that could consume a person from within. Doctors prescribed mercury-based compounds, quinine, or alcohol in large quantities. Patients were subjected to fever cures in which they were submerged in prolonged coal baths or were wrapped in vinegar-soaked sheets, all in the hope of forcing the body's temperature back down.

It wasn't until the late 19th and early 20th centuries that scientists began to recognize fever not as a disease, but as a natural response of the body's immune system. Research showed that infections, not fever, were the real enemy. Studies showed that moderate fever actually helped the body fight infection by slowing the growth of bacteria and enhancing immune function. This shift

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