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Elizabeth wrote to her mother about injecting 5cc of insulin ‘We only have a 2cc syringe. In 1996, a collection of letters she wrote to her mother from August to November 1922 was donated to the University of Toronto. She followed the ‘starvation diet’ strictly for 3 years and was taken to Toronto at age 14.
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Most ‘newsworthy’ of Banting’s early insulin patients was Elizabeth Hughes, daughter of the US Secretary of State. In November 1922 Danish company Novo Nordisk also began to produce insulin known as Toronto. Lilly was able to ship their pork insulin, called Iletin to Toronto by July, allowing Dr Banting and team to take on more patients. June 1922, in an effort to mass produce insulin in a cost effective way, the University of Toronto partnered with Eli Lilly. March 1922, there was a 3 month shortage of insulin, as supply was not able to keep up with demand.
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Watch this amazing ‘Canadian Heritage Minute’ video: 11 days later he was injected again, with the extract further purified by Collip and it worked! Leonard Thompson lived 14 more years with insulin, and died of pneumonia at age 27. It caused an abscess and an allergic reaction. On Janu13 year old Leonard Thompson was the first human injected with the insulin extracted from pig pancreas. He came up with an extraction process that made it pure enough to try on humans. In December, James Collip, a biochemist with an interest in hormones, was recruited to help purify the pancreatic extract. Macleod provided additional labs resources so the results could be reproduced. In August 1921, their extract ‘isletin’ (later called insulin) decreased glucose and improved the overall condition of Marjorie, a dog with diabetes.
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Best had the necessary lab skills for the project, since most of Banting’s experience was as a battlefield surgeon. In May 1921, Banting went to Toronto to begin his research, joined by an undergraduate summer student assistant, Charles Best. Despite the fact that 400 previous attempts to treat diabetes in animals with pancreatic extract had failed when tried on humans, Dr Macleod agreed to supervise him. He was put in touch with Professor John Macleod, an expert on carbohydrate metabolism. Banting saw the potential for isolating an extract related to diabetes from the pancreas and wrote it in his notebook October 30, 1920. On October 20, 1920, he was preparing for a lecture on the pancreas by reading an article which concluded that a hormone secreted into the blood by the islets of Langerhans controlled glucose metabolism. He was seeing few patients, and took a side job as an instructor at Western University Medical School to make ends meet. Returning from the war with a shrapnel injury to the right arm and a case of PTSD, he did a 1 year surgical internship at the Hospital for Sick Children (aka Sick Kids) in Toronto, and then set up a private practice in London Ontario. Sir Frederick Banting graduated as a surgeon from the University of Toronto in 1916 and immediately left for England with the Canadian Army Medical Corp. The discovery of insulin is one of the most significant events in the field of medicine. Death could be delayed for at the very most 2 years, with a very strict starvation diet. Before injected insulin was available, Type 1 diabetes was a death sentence. Today is World Diabetes Day, and this year we celebrate 100 years since the discovery of insulin. That is what happened 100 years ago, after the discovery of insulin.
#GENERATIONS LITTLE INFERNO FULL#
Imagine a hospital ward full of quasi-comatose, emaciated children wasting away of ketoacidosis….and watching them slowly come back to life one by one.