A grain merchant's son
Béla Schick was born on July 16, 1877, in Boglár, a town on the shore of Lake Balaton in Hungary that is now called Balatonboglár. His father, Jacob Schick, was a grain merchant, and his mother was Johanna Pichler Schick. The family moved to Graz, in Austria, where Béla grew up and went to school, graduating from the Staats Gymnasium in 1894.
His father expected him to join the family grain business. Béla wanted to be a doctor, and in particular a doctor for children. To win the argument he reached for a line from the Talmud, telling his father that the world is kept alive by the breath of children. The appeal worked. He stayed in Graz to study medicine at the Karl Franz University and received his medical degree on May 5, 1900.
In Graz he worked in the psychiatric and medical clinics and then at the children's clinic run by Theodor Escherich, one of the leading pediatricians of the age. After a period of service with the medical corps of the Austro-Hungarian army, he was ready to begin a career in research.
Vienna and a partnership with Pirquet
When Escherich moved to the University of Vienna, two of his young assistants followed him. One was Schick, who began work at the Vienna children's clinic in August 1902. The other was Clemens von Pirquet, an aristocratic physician with a gift for theory. Schick became Pirquet's close collaborator, and the two men spent the next years studying how the body's defenses behave in sick children.
Schick would remain at the University of Vienna for more than two decades, rising from intern to assistant in the pediatrics clinic and finally to lecturer and professor of pediatrics. He also published widely with Escherich, including a book on scarlet fever in 1912, and studied tuberculosis and the feeding of newborn babies.
Serum sickness and the birth of allergy
At the turn of the century, the best treatment for diphtheria was antitoxin made from the blood of horses. It saved many lives, but doctors noticed that a large share of the children who received big doses later developed strange delayed symptoms: rashes, fever, swelling and painful joints, often a week or more after the injection.
Schick and Pirquet studied these reactions closely. In 1905 they published a classic monograph, Die Serumkrankheit (Serum Sickness), which described the condition and paid special attention to the time that passed between the first injection and the appearance of symptoms. They concluded that the trouble was not caused directly by the serum but by the patient's own immune system reacting to the foreign horse proteins.
This was a startling idea. Immunity was thought of as purely protective, yet here the body's defenses were making a person ill. In 1906 Pirquet gave the phenomenon a name, allergy, from Greek words meaning other work. Schick is widely credited as his partner in developing the concept. Hay fever, hives, asthma, food allergies and drug reactions are all now understood through the framework the two men laid down, and allergists still treat serum sickness as a classic example of an immune reaction gone wrong.
The Schick test
Diphtheria was one of the great killers of childhood. The bacterium grows in the throat and releases a toxin that can choke a child with a thick gray membrane and damage the heart and nerves. In the United States alone, the disease struck about 100,000 people in 1927 and caused about 10,000 deaths, most of them children.
Horse serum antitoxin could prevent or treat the disease, but because it so often caused serum sickness, doctors were reluctant to give it to every child who might be exposed. They needed a way to tell which children were already protected and which were in danger. Schick found it. In 1913 he published a test that was remarkably simple: a doctor injected a tiny amount of diluted diphtheria toxin into the skin of the forearm. If the child had no protective antibodies, the spot turned red and swollen within a few days. If the child was immune, little or nothing happened.
The test made it possible to protect children efficiently. Doctors could reserve treatment for the vulnerable and spare the rest, and public health officials could measure, school by school and city by city, how many children still lacked immunity. When diphtheria toxoid vaccines arrived in the 1920s, the Schick test was used to check whether immunization had worked and whether protection lasted. The discovery made Schick famous around the world.
Mount Sinai and a war on diphtheria
In 1923 Schick left Vienna for New York to become pediatrician-in-chief at Mount Sinai Hospital. He became an American citizen that year, and in 1925 he married Catherine C. Fries, a New York lawyer. From 1936 he also taught the diseases of children as a professor at Columbia University's College of Physicians and Surgeons, and he served as director or consultant at Sea View Hospital on Staten Island, the Willard Parker Hospital, the New York Infirmary for Women and Children and Beth Israel Hospital.
In New York he helped lead a massive five-year campaign against diphtheria. The Metropolitan Life Insurance Company distributed 85 million pieces of literature urging parents to save your child from diphtheria, with illustrations by a young German immigrant artist, Gerta Ries. Testing and immunization spread through schools and clinics. The campaign is credited with virtually eliminating the disease that had killed children since ancient times.
His standing among colleagues was enormous. Doctors nominated him for the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine three times, in 1925 and twice in 1936. In 1954 the American Pediatric Society gave him its John Howland Award.
A doctor children loved
Schick was known as much for his warmth as for his science. His office held a collection of dolls and toy animals he had gathered on his travels, and he would play the piano or bring out one of the figures to calm a frightened child. He did not show a stethoscope until the child was relaxed. By his own estimate he treated more than a million children over his career.
Though he and his wife had no children of their own, he wrote for parents. His 1932 book Child Care Today argued for little punishment and no corporal punishment at all, and warned that trauma early in life could leave a lasting mark. These views were advanced for their time. After retiring from Mount Sinai in 1943 he stayed on as a consulting pediatrician, and from 1950 to 1962 he headed the pediatric department at Beth-El Hospital in Brooklyn, still working well into his eighties.
Not every idea he pursued held up. In 1920 he proposed that menstruating women gave off a toxin, which he called menotoxin. Later researchers tested the claim, and by 1958 it had been firmly disproved.
How people benefit today
Diphtheria has not disappeared, but in countries with strong vaccination programs it has become a rarity. The United States, where the disease once sickened 100,000 to 200,000 people a year in the 1920s, recorded only 11 cases between 2000 and 2025. Today children are protected with diphtheria toxoid in combination vaccines such as DTaP, and adolescents and adults receive Tdap or Td boosters. The World Health Organization reports that in 2025 about 85 percent of the world's infants, some 110 million babies, received the three recommended doses of a diphtheria-containing vaccine.
Schick's test helped make that possible. It gave doctors and public health officials their first practical way to measure immunity in a population and to direct protection to the children who needed it, a principle that still guides vaccination campaigns. Once safer toxoids made routine immunization of every child the standard, the test itself was no longer needed, which is a measure of how completely the disease it targeted was brought under control.
His work on serum sickness has an even broader reach. The idea that the immune system can cause disease as well as prevent it underlies the whole field of allergy and immunology. Every allergy skin test, every treatment for asthma or hay fever and every warning about a drug reaction rests on the concept that Schick and Pirquet first described in a Vienna children's clinic.
Jewish roots
Schick grew up in a Jewish family in Graz, the son of a grain merchant. The Talmudic saying he used to persuade his father to let him study pediatrics shows how naturally the Jewish tradition of his upbringing shaped his sense of calling. He is honored by the Jewish-American Hall of Fame, which commissioned a medal in his honor from the sculptor Gerta Ries Wiener, the same artist who, as a young woman, had illustrated his diphtheria campaign leaflets more than seven decades earlier.
Published sources say little about his personal religious practice, so it is best described simply: he was born and raised Jewish, and his work served children of every background.
Legacy
Béla Schick fell ill with pleurisy during a cruise to South America late in life. He was brought back to Mount Sinai Hospital, where he died on December 6, 1967, at the age of 90. A residence hall at Stony Brook University in New York bears his name.
His legacy is measured in lives that were never threatened. A disease that once filled children's wards every winter is now unknown to most parents in much of the world, and the science of allergy that he helped found touches millions of people every day. The boy who told his father that the world is kept alive by the breath of children spent his long life making sure that more of them kept breathing.
Sources & further reading
Bela Schick, Jewish Virtual Library · Schick, Bela (1877-1967), World of Microbiology and Immunology, Encyclopedia.com · Nomination Archive: Béla Schick, NobelPrize.org · Diphtheria fact sheet, World Health Organization · Béla Schick, Wikipedia · Researched from the sources above and checked against them. Spotted an error? Tell us.
A life 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.