The Christmas Miracle of Emil von Behring

Abstract

The foundation story of immunology is the Christmas miracle of Emil von Behring, whose diphtheria antitoxin was first used to save the life of a child on Christmas Day 1891. Modern scholarship has dismissed it as historically and scientifically implausible: Behring’s lab did not have enough antitoxin serum for use in humans, and Ernst von Bergmann had prohibited its use at the Charité. But antitoxin was tried that December by their assistants, Erich Wernicke, who processed injected rams and horses and harvested the serum for Behring, and Heinrich Geissler, who was one of Bergmann’s house physicians. Especially during the Christmas season, it is easy to imagine Wernicke and Geissler bypassing protocol and giving the serum a try as a last-ditch effort to save a dying child. Derek Linton, a Behring biographer, wrote: A harried nurse confronted by a dying infant belatedly remembers that a doctor with a promising remedy for diphtheria urged her to bring hopeless cases to his attention and has him roused from his slumber on the other side of Berlin in the middle of the night on December 20, 1891. The injection of his wonder serum then rapidly resuscitates the comatose infant. Five days later, the parents celebrate the most joyous Christmas of their lives with their fully recovered daughter.