Hot, toxic and healing.

In this article the author discusses aspects of century-old fever therapies that might offer more effective ways to treat cancer. Topics include the U.S. surgeon William Coley's quest to find an alternative cancer treatment, his use of fever therapy, which is the treatment of cancer with pathogenic bacteria, what Coley's treatments, spontaneous remissions, and epidemiological studies have in common, and the immunoprotective role of pathogen recognition receptor ligands (PRRL).