Insulin: When a Canadian discovery resurrected thousands from the dead Few recoveries from impending death more dramatic than this have ever been witnessed by a physician, wrote one of the earliest witnesses to the effects of insulin
Author of the article: Tristin Hopper
Publishing date: May 03, 2021 • 4 hours ago • 6 minute read • The 1630 painting The Vision of Ezekiel, which depicts the Biblical account of a valley of bones being resurrected into living beings. Physicians in the 1920s would reference Ezekiel in describing the effects of insulin.
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By the early 1920s, James Havens, a Kodak executive living in upstate New York, had known his son mostly as an invalid. After a diagnosis of juvenile diabetes at age 15, Jim Jr. had entered adulthood as an emaciated skeleton hovering in and out of coma.
After years of desperately seeking out cures, Havens began hearing rumours of a team of Canadian doctors who were pioneering a “miracle” treatment for diabetes. Pulling on his Canadian contacts in the photography industry, Havens was able to secure several vials of the new treatment the first ever shipped to the United States just as his increasingly delirious son began to take a turn for the worst. In rare moments of clarity, the young Havens would reportedly wake up just enough to beg his doctors for death.
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Commemorative stamp marks 100th anniversary of University of Toronto’s discovery of insulin Canada Post unveiled the new stamp at an online symposium sponsored by Diabetes Action Canada, U of T’s Banting & Best Diabetes Centre and the department of medicine in the Temerty Faculty of Medicine
Among the treasures in the University of Toronto’s archives are letters from grateful diabetic patients and their families addressed to Frederick Banting, who, along with Charles Best, J. J. R. Macleod and James Collip, discovered the role of insulin in the disease.
So, it’s fitting that this year’s celebrations marking the 100th anniversary of the medical breakthrough at U of T include a new Canada Post stamp.