100 years ago, on January 11, 1922, 14-year-old Leonard Thompson received an insulin injection as a treatment for diabetes and became the first person in history to ever receive an insulin injection!
Leonard Thompson was born in 1908 and diagnosed with type 1 diabetes in 1919. On December 2, 1921, he was admitted to Toronto General Hospital. He weighed 29.5 kg, was poorly nourished, pale and had the smell of acetone in his breath. His hair was falling out. He was drifting in and out of coma. Desperate, Leonard’s father agreed to participate in clinical trials for pancreatic extracts by Banting and Best.
Thus, on January 11, 1922, Leonard became the first person to ever receive an insulin injection. However, the preparation was impure and had little effect on his blood glucose and resulted in an allergic reaction. On January 23, he received a second set of injections, purified by James Collip. There was an immediate improvement in his blood glucose, as reported in Banting, Best, Collip, Campbell and Fletcher’s seminal paper published in the Canadian Medical Association Journal, March 1922. With daily injections over the next week, his sugar levels in the blood and urine fell sharply. Thompson lived for 13 more years, eventually dying of pneumonia at age 27.