Slice of Life #4 - The Story of Insulin

Maria, another slicer, had mentioned in a comment on my post yesterday, about how while we love reading about medieval times and tales of ancient Rome she's, so thankful to live in this day and age. And how modern science and medicine has blessed us.

It's so true! For me I am forever grateful to modern science and specifically the invention of insulin, considering my daughter's dependency on insulin as result of her diabetes. It reminded me of a story of when insulin was invented in the 1920's. Up until then a diagnosis of diabetes was a death sentence. A common treatment was restricting sugar or carbohydrate intake, essentially starvation, but that would only last so long. So children with diabetes eventually were in the hospital and very, very sick or in a comas from diabetic ketoacidosis (DKA). Parents were basically waiting around for their children to die. At first they tested insulin on dogs with diabetes and saw remarkable results, the dogs recovered, symptoms relieved. Before giving the insulin to human patients, which at that time was from animals and from what I read was a merky brown substance and injected with long thick needles (Ugghhhh), Frederick Banting and Charles Best injected themselves, even though they didn't have diabetes, to make sure it was relatively safe. They ended up feeling dizzy and light headed, but no serious side effects. The first person with diabetes to be given insulin as a trial was Leonard Thompson, he improved dramatically and the news spread. Banting and his boss Macleod recieved the Nobel Prize in 1923 for their work.

One of the most inspiring stories to me, however, is one my husband came across, that we had read not long after Elisabeth's diagnosis and I can only imagine this scene from a parent's perspective. So in the very early days after the insulin was created, the doctors would go to hospital wards, children's wings. I imagine the parents whose children were so very weak from basically starving to death or in a coma from DKA and were basically waiting for their children to die. Well the doctors would go from bed to bed, injecting the insulin into each child. By the time the doctors got to the last bed, the children in the first beds had woken up from their comas. That is just AMAZING to me! They essentially had risen these children from the dead! I picture parents fainting and hugs through many tears.

I leave you with this. In a bit of reading I did looking for that story again, which I couldn't find, but I found this - twenty five words Frederick Banting had written on October 30th, 1920 after he begun his initial research, that led to his miracle break through. This is like poetry to me...

Diabetus
Ligate pancreatic ducts of dogs. Keep
dogs alive till acini degenerate
leaving Islets. Try to isolate the
internal secretion of these to relieve
glycosurea.

I don't get it all, but knowing what these twenty five words led to, makes them precious to me.