Word: schick
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...young doctor in Vienna, Schick worked with Clemens von Pirquet on serum sickness and similar sensitivities. The two coined the word "allergy." Von Pirquet hit upon the tuberculin test, which shows whether the subject has (or has ever had) tuberculosis, and Schick thought the same idea might be applied to other diseases. What he got was slightly different but more valuable: a remarkably accurate and fairly simple test which shows whether a subject is vulnerable to diphtheria...
...diphtheria, partly because it is especially deadly for children in the tender two-to-five age bracket. Last week Yeshiva University in New York City held a special convocation to give an honorary degree to a physician who had done much to take the dread out of diphtheria: Bela Schick, the little-known man behind the famous Schick test...
When Bela Schick was still a boy in Hungary, German researchers tracked down the microbe which causes diphtheria, and isolated the poisonous secretion which makes a strange, strangling membrane grow across many a victim's throat. They got as far as developing a horse serum which could be used either as a preventive against the disease or as a remedy after it had struck. But so many people got sick from the serum itself that doctors hated to give it as a preventive unless they could be sure that it was really necessary. They needed a test to show...
...Schick announced the test in 1913 Within ten years, a new and far safer immunizing substance (toxoid) took most of the risk out of preventive measures. Nowadays, throughout most of the U.S. and in many another country, babies get their first protective shot by the time they are a year old. Years after the first shot, the Schick test (two injections, one in each arm) shows whether the immunity has lasted or needs renewing. And it will show at any time whether a preventive shot has "taken...
When Metropolitan started its public-service ads, more than 15,000 people were dying in the U.S. each year from diphtheria. The company soon hammered home the idea that these deaths were unnecessary, thanks to the Schick test and the proof (in 1923) of the value of toxin-antitoxin. Metropolitan officials have had the satisfaction of seeing diphtheria become so rare that they do not need to campaign against it any more. So, too, with typhoid...