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General Paralysis of the Insane (GPI) sufferers accounted for about 1 in 12 of mental hospital admissions. Patients with this illness would show signs of sudden psychotic symptoms, with unusual eye and muscular reflexes, speech and hearing problems, seizures and dementia, leading to incapacitation and death. The cause of GPI was an invasion of the central nervous system by syphilitic bacteria. In 1917 a new treatment was developed which involved deliberately infecting GPI patients with malaria, because the high fever which is a symptom of malaria raised the body temperature to as high as 40ºC and killed the bacteria causing the GPI. The cure was discovered after an outbreak of malaria in a mental hospital left many patients unexpectedly cured of their GPI.
In 1923 some of the mental hospitals run by the London County Council (LCC), including Horton Hospital, started to trial the malaria therapy. In 1925 it was decided to set up a specialist centre for London just to provide this malaria therapy for GPI patients. The centre, together with a separate specialist laboratory for the study of malaria, was established at Horton.
By 1935 about 700 patients had been treated. 75% were said to have recovered completely. The centre was named the Mott Clinic in the late 1920s, named after the Director of the Central Laboratory and Pathologist to the LCC Mental Hospitals, Sir Fredric Mott (1855-1926).
The development of antibiotics such as penicillin after World War Two reduced the need for malaria therapy. The laboratory was instead turned into a malaria research centre. The Mott Clinic became known as the Ministry of Health Malaria Laboratory, until 1952 when it became the Malaria Reference Laboratory. The Laboratory later moved from Epsom to the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine, becoming known as the Health Protection Agency Malaria Reference Laboratory.