- Person
- Béla Schick
- Lived
- 1877–1967
- Field
- Pediatrics, immunology
- From
- Hungarian-American
The story
In the early 1900s the standard treatment for diphtheria was antitoxin taken from the blood of horses. It saved many children's lives, but doctors at the University of Vienna children's clinic noticed something puzzling. A week or more after a large dose, many children developed rashes, fever, swelling and aching joints, even though the serum itself was not poisonous.
Two young pediatricians at the clinic, Béla Schick and Clemens von Pirquet, set out to understand why. Schick, born in Hungary in 1877 and raised in a Jewish family in Graz, had followed their teacher Theodor Escherich to Vienna in 1902. Working together, the two men studied the timing and pattern of the reactions in detail. In 1905 they published a classic monograph, Die Serumkrankheit (Serum Sickness), which described the condition, paid close attention to the delay between the injection and the symptoms, and recommended ways of treating it.
Their explanation was a startling one. The illness came from the patient's own immune system reacting to the foreign horse proteins. Immunity had been seen as purely protective, but here the body's defenses were causing disease. In 1906 Pirquet gave this kind of altered reaction a name, allergy, from Greek words meaning other work. Schick is widely credited as his partner in developing the concept, and some sources say the two coined the term together.
The idea opened a whole branch of medicine. Hay fever, hives, asthma, food allergies and reactions to drugs and insect stings are all now understood as immune responses to substances that are harmless in themselves. Schick went on to devise a skin test for diphtheria, publishing his famous Schick test in 1913, and his technique of small skin injections was later adapted for people with allergies.
Serum sickness is still taught to medical students as a classic example of an immune reaction gone wrong, and the field of allergy and immunology that grew from this work now cares for many millions of patients around the world.
Why it matters
Every allergy skin test, asthma treatment and warning about a drug reaction rests on the concept of allergy that Schick and Pirquet first described in 1905.
About Béla Schick
Hungarian-born pediatrician whose simple skin test for diphtheria helped turn a leading killer of children into a rare disease, and who helped found the study of allergy.
More about Béla Schick
Sources
- Schick, Bela (1877-1967) Encyclopedia.com (World of Microbiology and Immunology)
- Béla Schick Wikipedia
- Béla Schick Wikipedia (German)
- Clemens von Pirquet Wikipedia
Another act of tikkun olam. This is part of tikkun olam, the Jewish idea of repairing the world, and every one of us can add to it.