The First Insulin Injection
Next: January 11, 2027
The day diabetes met its match.
The story
Where it comes from
This Story marks the anniversary of 11 January 1922, when Leonard Thompson, a 14-year-old patient at Toronto General Hospital, became the first person with diabetes to be injected with insulin. He weighed 65 pounds and was close to death. The extract, made by Frederick Banting and Charles Best at the University of Toronto, was not yet pure enough and helped only a little. On 23 January he was given a purer extract made by James Collip, and within a day his blood sugar fell to normal and he began to recover.
How it's celebrated
There is no formal observance, but the anniversary is a good day to thank the doctors, nurses and researchers behind everyday medicines, and the people who live with diabetes and manage it every day. The University of Toronto's Thomas Fisher Rare Book Library keeps the insulin papers, including Thompson's hospital records, in an online exhibition anyone can browse. The world marks World Diabetes Day each November on Banting's birthday.
Did you know
- Leonard Thompson lived for another 13 years on insulin.
- Another early patient, five-year-old Teddy Ryder, weighed just 26 pounds when treatment began and lived to the age of 76.
- Banting and John Macleod won the 1923 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine for the discovery of insulin, barely two years after the first injection.
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