On this day in 1922, at Toronto General Hospital, 14-year-old Canadian Leonard Thompson became the first person to receive an insulin injection as treatment for diabetes.

And Diabetes Is... Diabetes has been recognized as a distinct medical condition for more than 3,000 years, and for thousands of years, a diabetes diagnosis meant wasting away to a certain death. Referred to as the sugar disease, its cause was a mystery until the 20th century. By the early 1920s, many researchers strongly suspected that diabetes was caused by a malfunction in the digestive system related to the pancreas gland, a small organ that sits on top of the liver.

Prior Treatment. At that time, the only way to treat the fatal disease was through a low-carbohydrate and low-sugar diet. By following this regimen, patients were able to live ~ for about a year.

A Great Notion. In the hot summer of 1921, in a laboratory at the University of Toronto, Canadians Fred Banting and Charles Best were able to make a pancreatic extract which had anti-diabetic characteristics.

Testing, One, Two, Three...

• They successfully tested their extract on diabetic dogs. Their program of insulin injections returned the dogs to normalcy. They repeated their experiments with the same results.
• Problems occurred, however, due to the varying purity of their insulin extract.
• Chemist James Bertram Collip went to work with the group to help with the purification.