Read more posts in this series here.The expanding legal threats facing former President Donald J. To book the traveling exhibition or see when it comes to your town, visit the traveling exhibition page at. Despite his lengthy pediatric career, Schick remained best known for his test, prompting him to tell the reporter documenting his day-to-day work “You see, I’m not just a scratch on the arm!”Įxplore From DNA to Beer: Harnessing Nature in Medicine & Industry online for yourself at. In 1957, with diphtheria under control in the United States, an 80 year old, still-practicing Schick was featured in Life magazine. Students participating in the drive were given buttons reading “I am Schicked! Are you?” The Schick test determined which students were not yet immune and should receive a dose of a new vaccine which conferred immunity for years rather than the mere three weeks of the earlier antitoxin serum. Just two years prior to his arrival, his test provided the New York Public Health System with an important tool in their mass diphtheria immunization campaign for the city’s school children. In 1923, Schick moved to the US, after accepting a post at New York’s Mount Sinai Hospital. Courtesy the National Museum of American History This “positive” Schick test identified which patients would benefit from a dose of preventative antitoxin serum.ĭiphtheria Prevention: Giving the Schick test in a Baby Health Station, Brooklyn, New York, about 1920. Within 24-48 hours, those patients who had never been exposed to diphtheria showed a redness at the injection site of the toxin as the body mounted an immune response to the novel substance. As a control, the other arm was injected with the same amount of toxin in a salt solution, mixed with enough antitoxin to neutralize its effect. In the early 1910s, Schick developed a simple skin test that allowed doctors to distinguish between those with a natural immunity to diphtheria from previous exposure and those who stood to gain protective temporary immunity from an injection.ĭoctors injected a very small dose of diphtheria toxin in a salt solution (1/50 of the minimal lethal dose for a guinea pig) into the arm of a patient to be tested. So now doctors were faced with a conundrum: how to balance the risks of serum sickness with the benefits of controlling diphtheria outbreaks through preventative antitoxin injections? Enter the Schick test. (Von Pirquet and Schick coined the word “allergy” in 1906.) What patients were experiencing was in fact an allergic reaction to horse proteins present in the antitoxin serum. Their research demonstrated that patients who were repeatedly injected with serum suffered not only more intense bouts of sickness with each successive injection, but in some cases, antitoxin injections resulted in dangerous anaphylaxis. In 1905, Austrian pediatricians Clemens E. von Pirquet and Béla Schick published the results of their investigation into this phenomenon, in their treatise Serum Sickness (in the original German, Die Serumkrankheit.)īéla Schick, 1929. In some patients, injections of antitoxin resulted in an immune reaction characterized by fever, rash, swelling of the glands, and joint pain. An injection conferred immunity on a patient for approximately three weeks.Īs with many miracles, however, antitoxin came with a hitch: serum sickness. Doctors quickly recognized its potential as a prophylactic and began controlling outbreaks by dosing residents and employees of closed-quartered institutions like hospitals and orphanages with serum after coming into contact with an infected person. diphtheria’s toxin in the body, became used for more than just treating the infected. Soon the antitoxin, which works to neutralize the effects of C. “Injecting Diphtheria Antitoxin,” illustration from a Parke Davis publication, 1895.Ĭourtesy The Historical Medical Library of The College of Physicians of Philadelphia. It should come as no surprise then, when Emil von Behring developed diphtheria antitoxin serum as a cure in the 1890s it was hailed as nothing short of a miracle. Its terrifying symptoms-from slowly poisoning the victim to forming a pseudomembrane in the throat causing slow suffocation-are the stuff of nightmares. As curators of our most recent exhibition, From DNA to Beer: Harnessing Nature in Medicine and Industry, Diane and Mallory spent months researching four different microbes and the influence they’ve had on human life.Ĭorynebacterium diphtheria, the bacteria which causes diphtheria, is easily the nastiest microbe we researched for From DNA to Beer. Circulating Now welcomes guest bloggers Diane Wendt and Mallory Warner from the Division of Medicine and Science at the Smithsonian National Museum of American History.
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