1922:

“…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 [insulin] extract. Before they had reached the last dying child, the first few were awakening from their coma, to the joyous exclamations of their families…”

https://www.diabetes.org.uk/ab...s-88-years-ago-today

Interesting bit of history, especially for those of us with diabetes.

Banting, Best, and Collip never had to question if their lives had meaning.

My oldest daughter would be dead without it. I lost a high school friend several years ago who suffered from it, but he made some stupid life choices that cost him his life.

A lot has changed in 20 years, but a whole lot more needs to change.

While it was and is truly a saving grace for many, it also makes you wonder when you look back at the medical advances and discoveries that were made in roughly the first half of the 20th century as opposed to what has been discovered and done in the time since. Just seems like more cures and vaccines happened during that time than in more recent years. While advances have certainly been made, with all the computer power/modeling and research facilities and knowledge from the last 40 to 50 years, you would think that more things like diabetes would have a cure as opposed to just an ongoing treatment that is a cash cow for pharmaceutical companies. As we are coming up on the 100 year anniversary of this discovery, it would be really something to see a cure on the horizon for those that suffer from it. For the record, I do not have it, and it does not seem to run in my family but have worked closely with people in the past that did and have shared in their experiences with it and management of their symptoms ranging from the injections/medications to an insulin pump user.

I will humbly disagree with Dtech, seems to me that medical advances are coming at a faster and faster pace. The seeming flood of knowledge that occured early in the 20th century was from picking the low-hanging fruit, and as much the result of sanitation, both in personal hygiene and food/water safety. Emerging genetic therapies promise a comparable advance in general healthfulness, although I do agree that the current medical economy is not optimal to promote therapies intended to make medical attention unnecessary.

For example, in past times, people didn't often die from cancer, they simply didn't live long enough to develop it. Does this mean that cancer wasn't a threat?

As far as the subject of this thread goes, insulin wasn't invented so much as it was a naturally-occurring hormone that was discovered.

And, there seem to be many who don't understand the difference between Type 1 diabetes (inability of the body to produce sufficient insulin) AKA "juvenile diabetes" and Type 2 (insulin resistance, failure of the body to efficiently use the insulin it produces) AKA adult-onset diabetes. Many researchers believe the latter has become more prevalent is because people are eating "better" throughout their lives (rather than suffering from malnutrition during much of it). I suspect the growing incidence is more because doctors are increasingly looking for it in routine health assessments.

There have been cures of Type 1 made by transplanting beta cells from one individual to another. I think these transplants have mostly been between identical twins.

I actually work with a guy with Type 1 who developed Type 2 as he aged (he is mid-60's now). Very few Type 1's live long enough for this to happen.

How many here have cardiac stents? Or replacement joints? Or went home from the hospital within a day of surgery? Or have NOT had a stroke/heart attack caused by their hypertension and high cholesterol? Or have survived cancer? Or have had an aneurysm found and treated before it killed them?

Medical knowledge and treatments have progressed at an exponential rate and are continuing to do so.

While this is not meant in any way to be argumentative, please re-read my post. To clarify, I was referring more generally to cures and vaccines as they refer to medications and injectables for a variety of diseases/conditions, and also diabetes as the general overall topic as well, hence the "while advances have certainly been made" line. I was not referring to medical advances in general for a wider variety of conditions and ailments. Of course we continue to make exponential advances in many areas of treatment and prolonging life, and thank God for that. Then again, a medication I take regularly in 2019 unrelated to diabetes was also discovered in the 1920's and available since the 1950's so I'm still quite grateful to those that have pioneered medicine. What we might now consider "low hanging fruit" was quite the scientific break through back then and in some cases an important foundation to some of what we have and still use today.