“ONE OF MEDICINE’S MORE DRAMATIC MOMENTS”.
Annalisa sent me a link to this article about the first use of insulin.
Of course I teared up reading it.
The article begins: “Before 1921, it was exceptional for people with Type 1 diabetes to live more than a year or two.”
The article continues: “Children dying from diabetic ketoacidosis (DKA) were kept in large wards, often with 50 or more patients in a ward, mostly comatose. Grieving family members were often in attendance, awaiting the (until then, inevitable) death.
In one of medicine’s more dramatic moments Banting, Best, 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.”