12/21/2025
Now, people die because they can't afford insulin. Companies charge outrageous prices for a drug that is relatively cheap to produce. It is one of many reasons why we need Medicare for All! Joseph Sparks
A fourteen-year-old boy lay in a hospital bed weighing sixty-five pounds, his body shrinking, his breath smelling of acetone, his mind drifting in and out of consciousness. His organs were failing one by one. Doctors had already done everything medicine knew how to do.
And now his father was being asked a question no parent should ever face.
Toronto General Hospital, early January 1922.
The boy’s name was **Leonard Thompson**.
Three years earlier, Leonard had been diagnosed with Type 1 diabetes. In 1919, that diagnosis was not a condition you lived with. It was a sentence you waited out. There was no insulin. No effective treatment. No second act. Once symptoms appeared, death followed—sometimes in months, sometimes in weeks.
Doctors had only one tool, and it was brutal. Starvation.
They called it “dietary regulation.” In practice, it meant slow death. Leonard was restricted to about 450 calories a day, barely enough to keep a healthy child alive, let alone one whose body could no longer process sugar. The logic was simple and merciless: if sugar was killing him, he would be denied food that could become sugar.
It bought time. Not life. Just time.
Children with diabetes wasted away on these diets. Parents watched ribs press through skin, hair fall out, energy vanish. Some children died from diabetes. Others died from malnutrition. Either way, they died.
By December 1921, Leonard was out of time.
His parents, Harry and Florence Thompson, brought him to Toronto General Hospital knowing what the doctors would say. Leonard was skeletal. Weak. Slipping into a diabetic coma.
The doctors did not soften the truth. Their son was dying. Conventional medicine had nothing left to offer.
But there was something else.
Something experimental. Something dangerous. Something that had never been tried in a human being.
While Leonard faded, a young surgeon named **Frederick Banting** was working in a crude laboratory at the University of Toronto. Banting believed the pancreas produced a substance that controlled blood sugar. If that substance could be isolated and injected, diabetes might be treated rather than endured.
It was an idea many had considered and abandoned.
Banting was not famous. He was not well funded. When he first presented his theory to Professor John Macleod, it was met with skepticism. Eventually, Macleod gave him a small lab, some experimental dogs, and a medical student, Charles Best.
Through the summer of 1921, Banting and Best worked relentlessly. They removed pancreases from dogs, induced diabetes, then injected pancreatic extracts. Time after time, blood sugar levels dropped. Dogs that should have died recovered.
The extract itself looked unpromising. Thick. Brown. Crude. Other scientists doubted it would ever be safe enough for humans.
By November 1921, the results could no longer be ignored. A biochemist named James Collip joined the team to help purify the substance. By January 1922, they believed they had something that might work.
They needed a patient desperate enough to try.
Leonard Thompson was dying enough to qualify.
Harry Thompson was asked to consent to an injection no human had ever received. There were no guarantees. No long-term data. No safety trials. Only animal experiments and fading hope.
Harry said yes.
On January 11, 1922, Leonard received the first injection of pancreatic extract.
It failed.
The extract was too impure. Leonard developed hives. His blood sugar barely changed. The treatment did nothing except prove how dangerous it could be.
The easy choice would have been to stop.
The team did not.
James Collip returned to the lab and worked obsessively. He refined the extraction process, removed protein contaminants, improved concentration, purified the solution again and again. He barely slept.
Meanwhile, Leonard continued to deteriorate. Every hour mattered.
Twelve days later, on January 23, 1922, the doctors tried again.
This time, the injection was different.
Within hours, Leonard’s blood sugar dropped from lethal levels toward normal. The acetone smell on his breath began to disappear. His vital signs stabilized. His medical chart recorded the change with quiet astonishment:
“The boy became brighter, more active, looked better and said he felt stronger.”
For the first time since his diagnosis, Leonard Thompson was not dying.
He received daily injections. His weight slowly increased. Color returned to his face. Strength came back to limbs that had nearly failed him. In May 1922, he left the hospital.
News spread quickly. A disease that had always meant death now had a treatment.
Parents flooded Toronto with letters. My child is dying. Please help us. Please send the medicine. The demand overwhelmed the tiny research team. They could not produce insulin fast enough. For months, supply was unreliable. At times, production failed completely.
Leonard himself went without steady insulin for long stretches, surviving on whatever batches could be made.
The breakthrough became permanent only when industry stepped in. Eli Lilly partnered with the University of Toronto to produce insulin at scale. By 1923, insulin was being shipped around the world.
Children stopped dying.
In October 1923, the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine was awarded to Banting and Macleod—less than two years after Leonard’s second injection. It remains the fastest Nobel recognition in medical history.
Banting publicly shared his prize money with Charles Best. Macleod shared his with James Collip. All four understood that no single person had done this alone.
And none of it would have mattered without one boy and one father willing to risk everything on an untested hope.
Leonard Thompson lived thirteen more years. He grew. He lived a life no diabetic child had ever been allowed to imagine. On April 20, 1935, he died of pneumonia at age twenty-seven. Insulin did not make him immortal.
It made him alive.
Without it, he would have died at fourteen.
Today, millions of people with Type 1 diabetes live full lives. They attend school, build careers, raise families, grow old. Every insulin injection traces back to that hospital bed in January 1922.
Leonard Thompson was the first.
The first to prove diabetes did not have to mean death. The first to cross the bridge between a fatal disease and a manageable one. The first to show that medicine could change the outcome.
His legacy is not a statue or a textbook paragraph. It is every life extended, every childhood saved, every parent who did not have to bury a child.
Progress did not come from certainty. It came from courage. From scientists who refused to quit after failure. From a father who said yes when the alternative was guaranteed loss. From a boy who became the answer to a question medicine had never solved before.
One injection. One child. One impossible choice.
And nothing in medicine was ever the same again.
