Although as “the Father of Modern Pediatrics” he was also a renowned pediatrician, Béla Schick (1877-1967) is remembered in the history of medicine primarily for the “Schick test,” a simple but transformative skin test that determines individual susceptibility to diphtheria and helped guide immunization campaigns that drastically reduced childhood mortality. Dating to the 1910-1913 era, the Schick test is a cutaneous test that introduces a standardized minute dose of diphtheria toxin intradermally and observing for a local reaction. The test allowed public-health authorities to identify which children lacked immunity and therefore most urgently required immunization or serum therapy, enabling more efficient use of limited antitoxin and focused public-health campaigns.
Less widely known outside medical-historical circles is how Schick’s Jewish identity, communal commitments, and institutional roles in Jewish hospitals and organizations shaped his career and public life. Across a long life that spanned the collapse of the Habsburg world, two World Wars, the Holocaust, and the founding of the State of Israel, Schick combined scientific innovation with leadership in Jewish medical institutions, philanthropic circles, and public-health education aimed at protecting children – an ethic he framed repeatedly with moral language rooted in Jewish concern for life.
Schick’s discovery facilitated early diagnosis and treatment and brought about an almost complete victory over the disease which, in 1927 alone, attacked over 100,000 Americans and caused over 10,000 deaths. As part of a five-year campaign that he coordinated, 85 million pieces of literature were distributed by the Metropolitan Life Insurance Company with an appeal to parents to “save your children from diphtheria.” A world-renowned expert on allergies, he also conducted classic research into scarlet fever and made important studies on tuberculosis, in which he described a symptom of the disease in the bronchial glands known as the “Schick sign.”
The fact that Schick was a pediatrician played a major part in his discovery of the Schick test, as he began his analysis of diphtheria by noting that it was primarily a disease of children and that adults were only rarely susceptible to it, and he became the first to map out the age ranges that marked susceptibility to diphtheria. Research at the beginning of the 20th century in New York showed that young Jewish children exhibited lower incidence of diphtheria. The reasons for this include the fact that Jewish religious and cultural customs emphasized frequent washing (e.g., ritual handwashing before meals, after waking, and after certain acts), bathing before Shabbat, and general cleanliness in food preparation, all of which served to reduce bacterial transmission. Moreover, breast milk provides antibodies (particularly IgA) that help protect infants from respiratory and gastrointestinal infections, and Jewish mothers were, on average, more likely to breastfeed longer than non-Jewish mothers in certain regions, possibly delaying or preventing diphtheria in the most vulnerable years. In addition, historical observers often remarked that Jewish parents tended to keep young children indoors during outbreaks and avoid contact with sick individuals, constituting early “quarantine-like” behavior.
Furthermore, while not directly related to C. diphtheriae, the general kashrut system encouraged sanitary food handling and avoidance of spoiled food, which may have reflected broader community concern for health. Additionally, Jewish communal structures, including charitable societies and Jewish hospitals, often meant that children received medical attention sooner in the course of illness. Finally, in some Jewish immigrant communities, prior exposure to milder strains of C. diphtheriae or similar bacteria may have conferred partial immunity before the most dangerous epidemics struck. In a beautiful tribute to the Torah way of life, one health official at the time noted: “The rules of life which orthodox Hebrews so flinchingly obey, as laid down by the Mosaic law… are applied to the daily life of individuals as no sanitary law can be.”
In the remarkable February 5, 1964, correspondence on his personal letterhead exhibited here, Schick writes:
In 1913, I discovered the Schick test for determining susceptibility to Diphtheria.
Putting this test into practice greatly hastened the possibility of wiping out the disease Diphtheria.”
Schick published and lectured widely on other pediatric topics, including scarlet fever and tuberculosis in children – including the “Schick sign” described for certain pulmonary-glandular involvement, infant nutrition, and allergic reactions – and he is credited for helping to define early concepts of allergy and hypersensitivity. Though his own marriage was childless, Schick, often called “the Dean of American Pediatricians,” co-authored Child Care Today, a popular and progressive guide to raising children in which he advised against corporal punishment decades before such advice had become commonplace. As the founder of the American Academy of Pediatrics, he generally eschewed publicity and spent as much time as possible with children on the ward and in his medical practice.
Born on the shore of Lake Balaton in what was then the Austro-Hungarian Empire (today Hungary), Schick’s parents were Johanna and Jacob, a grain merchant, and his family background combined middle-class economic activity marked by high aspirations for professional education for Béla. Schick trained in medicine in the Austro-Hungarian academic system, received his M.D. from the Karl Franz University of Graz in 1900, and served in prominent pediatric clinics in Vienna, where he worked with leading clinicians and researchers of the period. He began his studies on infectious disease in childhood, and became the first person to prove that illnesses which followed scarlet fever were allergic in nature. In 1918, Schick was appointed “Extraordinary Professor of Children’s Diseases” at the University of Vienna, a unique title that was developed for him because only Catholics could become full professors in Germany and Austria in those years and the euphemism “extraordinary” was employed to designate the lower rank of the unbaptized.
Biographical accounts emphasize that Schick grew up in a Jewish family and that his Judaism shaped his moral vocabulary from an early age. In one frequently-cited anecdote, a young Schick quoted the famous Talmudic quote that “The world is kept alive by the breath of children” to persuade his father to permit him to pursue medical training and pediatrics rather than to enter the family grain business. His formative medical years were spent in the Austro-Hungarian medical establishments, particularly Vienna, a milieu that included a significant number of Jewish students and physicians who combined secular science with communal engagement.
Scholars of American Jewish medical activism observing the postwar and interwar decades have identified figures such as Schick as emblematic of a generation of Jewish physicians who linked elite medicine to Jewish communal responsibilities: they staffed and steered Jewish hospitals, raised funds, and provided technical expertise for relief programs. Such work intensified after the pogroms of the early twentieth century and especially after the Holocaust, when American Jewish medical activism helped rebuild and reorganize medical care for survivors and for the emerging Jewish community in Eretz Yisrael, and Schick played an important role in that effort.
While there exists ample secondary-source evidence that Schick was culturally and communally Jewish, the record of his ritual practice – as, for example, his synagogue membership, kashrut observance, and private piety – is less fully documented in professional biographies and obituaries. However, his Jewish identity in civic and professional terms is clear, including bringing his prestigious medical leadership to Jewish hospitals and taking particular interest in the welfare of Jewish children.
Schick’s move to the United States in the early 1920s culminated in his appointment in 1923 as head of Mount Sinai Hospital, originally founded as the Jews’ Hospital in the 19th century and long a venerable central Jewish medical and charitable New York institution. In that role, he was not only a leading clinician and teacher, but also a public spokesperson for the hospital’s child health campaigns and broad public education efforts, and, under his leadership, the hospital consolidated programs in pediatrics, public-health outreach, and child welfare. Mount Sinai’s choice of Schick reflected both his international reputation and the pattern, common in the early 20th century, of Jewish medical institutions recruiting prominent Jewish-trained physicians from central Europe.
Later in his career, Schick also led pediatric services at other Jewish institutions including, for example, heading the pediatric department of Beth-El Hospital in Brooklyn. These institutional positions situated him at the center of American Jewish medical life, giving him a platform to advance both public-health science and communal welfare initiatives.
Throughout his medical career, Schick was widely honored by Jewish organizations and he participated in the charitable life of the community. Records in Jewish communal newspapers, in institutional histories, and in organizational publications evidence his receipt of honorary citations from Yeshiva University and other Jewish bodies, and The Jewish Telegraphic Agency and Jewish communal papers ran many items honoring him. He was often invited as a guest of Jewish medical organizations and he was awarded medals, named in dedications, and celebrated in Jewish press accounts as “a benefactor of children,” language that doubled as a communal honorific and a public-health endorsement. The Jewish press and Jewish institutional records also associate Schick with broader networks of Jewish medical philanthropy that, particularly after the First World War and into the interwar period, mobilized resources for immigrant communities, public-health campaigns, and institutions assisting Jews in Europe.
Exhibited here is a most telling letter in which Schick manifests his particular interest in helping Jewish students. In this intriguing November 19, 1927 correspondence, he writes to Dr. David Kaliski in support of a gentile who is interested in helping Jewish students:
Enclosed please find the letter written by Ding to me asking again for help. During work on the 31st of October [19]27 to the American Joint Distribution Committee, i.e. to Bernhard Kahn, Berlin. Ding’s idea is that we should support him writing eventually also to the Am. Joint Distr. Com. I really feel Ding should be supported. I know how much it means that Ding as a Gentile is interested to help Jewish students.
I would appreciate very much your cooperation.
With thanks and kindest regards
P.S. Please return the letter of Ding to me, or send me a copy of it if you think it would be better to send it to Berlin.
Dr. David John Kaliski (1884-1966), served as chief of the in genito-urinary clinic and as associate surgeon at Mount Sinai Hospital, where he was a colleague of Schick’s. He was elected president of the New York County Medical Society (1932), he devised the Kaliski Blood Transfusion Needle, he was an early advocate of medical insurance, and he became a director of United Medical Services when it was established in 1944 to provide prepaid medical care. An active Zionist, he served as acting president of the Zionist Organization of America; was vice chairman of the United Palestine Appeal (1929); was among the leading founders of the American Jewish Physicians Committee; served as a leader of the American Friends of the Hebrew University and was a driving force in the establishment of its Medical School; and served as a governor of the Hebrew University of Jerusalem.
Bernhard Kahn (1876-1955) dedicated fifty years of his life to welfare activities helping distressed Jews. He became head of the refugee department of the Joint Distribution Committee (1921), served as European director of the JDC (1924-1939) and as honorary chairman of the JDC European Council from 1939, when the advance of Naziism drove him to the United States, to 1950 when he was elected a JDC vice-chairman. He also served as a member of the board of directors of the Palestine Economic Corporation, Palestine Foundation Fund and the Haffkine Foundation, a vocational training institution, and as an executive member of the Jewish Agency from 1929-1931.
Schick’s decision to leave for America from Austria, where more than thirty members of his immediate family would be murdered in the Holocaust, saved his life. During the 1930’s he made many trips to Europe, and, keenly aware of the growing menace of Nazi Germany, he sponsored scores of Jews for admission to the United States before and during the years of World War II. Likewise, his wife, lawyer Catherine Fries, worked tirelessly to arrange lectures, banquets and dinners, and exhibitions and programs for the benefit of the victims of Nazism. During those years Schick’s typical day included helping Austrian and German intellectuals of Jewish ancestry settle in the United States.
One of his early direct encounters with the gathering Nazi storm occurred in a hotel in Italy in 1938, when he and Catherine were asked to leave by the manager at the insistence of a Nazi staying at the hotel. Although barred from travel to Austria, Schick, now an American citizen, made every effort to save family members still there; he managed to save one sister and the children of a stepsister, but his sister Frieda and her family died in a concentration camp and many members of his extended family also perished. The occupation of Austria destroyed all his illusions when he learned of the destruction, murder, and suicide of so many physicians he had counted as friends. In May 1938, he told attendees at a tuberculosis conference in Tampa that: “Many of the doctors who committed suicide after the recent annexation of Austria were my friends. I understand why they did it.”
As Jewish communal organizations increasingly engaged with relief and medical-building efforts in pre-state Eretz Yisrael and later Israel, particularly in the wake of World War II, prominent Jewish physicians in America often lent both moral support and technical advice, and Schick was very much a part of this professional-political milieu. On a trip to Eretz Yisrael in 1937, he was impressed with advances in Arab health, particularly in epidemic diseases, for which he credited Jewish immigrant physicians who had been fortunate to leave Europe before the Holocaust. He is specifically named as a participant, officer or honoree in organizations and programs that were explicitly tied to fundraising and institutional effort in support of Eretz Yisrael, including the United Palestine Appeal, “Friends of Palestine” type events, Histadrut support, and Jewish medical fundraising. The Abba Hillel Silver papers include items and lists in which Schick is named among promoters or correspondents for groups whose objects included “to establish the Hebrew nation in Palestine.”
Schick’s later career was long and distinguished; he was a celebrated figure in American pediatrics, honored by organizations such as the New York Academy of Medicine and the Jewish medical and philanthropic community. Press notices of his birthdays and centenary celebrations show a Jewish communal pattern of tribute: dinners at Jewish hospitals, plaques, and the naming of hospital departments or nurseries after him. His obituary notices in medical journals (e.g., JAMA, Pediatrics) emphasized both his scientific discoveries and his graciousness and public service to children.
Schick was buried in Westchester Hills Cemetery, Hastings-on-Hudson, N.Y., a Jewish cemetery (Stephen Wise Free Synagogue cemetery). While there is no record of any funeral notice or other report of any officiating rabbi or minister officiating at the funeral, his burial in a Jewish cemetery and his ties to Jewish hospitals and Jewish medical organizations suggest that a Jewish funeral service was very likely.
Schick’s robust institutional involvement but limited political-public record is not unusual for clinician-leaders of his era: many of the most consequential forms of support for the Yishuv and later Israel took the form of donations, institutional partnerships, and professional exchanges rather than public political manifestos. He stands as a prominent example of a Jewish-born Central European physician who brought scientific innovation and public-health leadership to the United States, while also investing his talents and reputation in Jewish hospitals and communal philanthropy. His Schick test transformed diphtheria control; his leadership at Mount Sinai and other institutions strengthened Jewish medical infrastructure in a critical period; and his public honors and Jewish press coverage attest to a figure whose Jewish identity mattered publicly.
