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b. May 12, 1874,
Vienna, Austria
d. Feb. 28, 1929, Vienna
Austrian physician who originated a skin test for tuberculosis that bears
his name.
Von Pirquet attended the universities of Vienna, Königsberg, and
Graz and graduated from Graz in 1900. He became a professor of pediatrics
at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore in 1908, a position he held for
two years before returning to Austria.
In 1906 von Pirquet noticed that patients who had received injections
of horse serum or smallpox vaccine usually had quicker, more severe reactions
to second injections. He used the word allergy to describe the reactions.
While studying the symptoms of cowpox vaccination, he also developed a
new theory about the incubation time of infectious diseases and the formation
of antibodies.
In Von Pirquet's skin test for tuberculosis, a drop of tuberculin is scratched
into the surface of a small area of skin. The development of a red, raised
area at the site of application, called Pirquet's reaction, indicates
the presence of tuberculosis. In 1909 he published the results of a series
of tuberculin tests of inhabitants of Vienna that showed that 70 percent
of the children tested had been infected by tuberculosis by the age of
10 and more than 90 percent by the age of 14.
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