First Use of Insulin in Treatment of Diabetes 88 Years Ago

First Use of Insulin in Treatment of Diabetes 88 Years Ago: On 11 January 1922, Leonard Thompson, a 14-year-old boy with diabetes, who lay dying at the Toronto General Hospital, Canada, was given the first injection of insulin. However, the extract was so impure that Thompson suffered a severe allergic reaction, and further injections were cancelled. Over the next 12 days, James Collip worked day and night to improve the ox-pancreas extract, and a second dose was injected on the 23 January. This was completely successful, not only in having no obvious side-effects, but in completely eliminating the glycosuria sign of diabetes. In one of medicine’s more dramatic moments Dr. Frederick Grant Banting, Charles Best, Dr. James Macleod and Collip. went from bed to bed, injecting an entire ward with the new purified extract. Before they had reached the last dying child, the first few were awakening from their coma, to the joyous exclamations of their families.