Insulin is first used to treat a diabetic patient
On this day · 11 January 1922
A dying 14-year-old in a Toronto hospital became the first person to receive insulin, turning a death sentence into a manageable condition.
Before 1922, a diagnosis of severe diabetes was effectively fatal. The only treatment was a starvation diet that bought patients weeks or months, not years. That changed in a Toronto hospital ward on January 11, 1922, when doctors injected an extract of insulin into Leonard Thompson, a 14-year-old boy who had wasted to roughly 65 pounds and was slipping toward a coma.
The extract had been isolated at the University of Toronto by Frederick Banting and Charles Best, with help from biochemist J.B. Collip and physiologist John Macleod. Thompson’s first dose was too impure and triggered a reaction, but a refined batch given days later worked dramatically, restoring his blood sugar toward normal.
A boy expected to die within weeks lived another 13 years.
Banting and Macleod received the 1923 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine, sharing their awards with Best and Collip. Insulin remains one of the most consequential therapies in medical history, sustaining millions of people with diabetes every day.
Sources & references
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