The Discovery of Insulin by Michael Bliss

Author:Michael Bliss
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: University of Toronto Press
Published: 2016-11-26T05:00:00+00:00

II

Insulin was one of North America’s first great contributions to medical science and practice. Its use only gradually spread to Europe and the rest of the world. If we exclude Zuelzer and his acomatol, the first European to use insulin was Dr. R. Carrasco-Formiguera, a young Spaniard who was spending the 1921–22 year studying at Harvard. He happened to be present when Banting gave the first presentation at New Haven. In June Carrasco-Formiguera wrote Macleod asking for details so he could try insulin on a desperately ill patient in Barcelona whom he had been keeping alive in the bare hope of something like this being discovered. In September Carrasco-Formiguera and an associate, Dr. Pere González, managed to make up a brown fluid containing insulin. It was very impure. Carrasco-Formiguera had to test each batch on himself: “sometimes marked and persistent pain made me decide not to use a particular batch.” On October 3, 1922, he gave ten cc. of his extract to Francesc Pons in Barcelona. The results were promising, but the patient later died when the doctors temporarily ran out of insulin. Carrasco-Formiguera was soon treating other patients, though, and later undertook to supervise the manufacture and distribution of insulin in Spain.26 Nobody else on the continent appears to have used insulin clinically until 1923.

No one in Britain seems to have paid much attention to the reports of Banting and Best’s researches published in North America in early 1922. (The first inquiry from Britain was by a Canadian at the Royal Infirmary in Edinburgh, Jonathan Meakins, who wrote Macleod on June 17, 1922, asking for more information so he could treat a diabetic colleague. Macleod sent directions on July 8, but Meakins did not use insulin, it appears, until January 1923.)27 Word of insulin reached the highest medical circles in Great Britain virtually out of nowhere – or almost nowhere: an obscure medical school in a far-off colony – in June 1922, when Macleod wrote the secretary of the Medical Research Council conveying the University of Toronto’s desire to give the council complete British patent rights to the anti-diabetic extract. Fitzgerald of the Connaught Laboratories was in England the next month and discussed the situation with the officers of the council. It was a young organization, created by the British government just before the war as an offshoot of developments in British health insurance, and was still feeling its way. The MRC scientists were interested, but skeptical.28 Miracle cures were always being announced in medicine, even by people who should know better. Dr. Henry H. Dale, director of the biochemistry and pharmacology department of the council’s National Institute for Medical Research, suggested that he and a biochemist colleague, Harold Dudley, visit Toronto to reconnoitre the alleged discovery.29 Dale and Dudley were in Toronto in late September and early October. They also studied insulin production in Indianapolis and visited several of the American clinics. Their reaction was immediately enthusiastic. “The thing is undoubtedly a true story,” Dale wrote Walter Fletcher,

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