How digestion works: what happens to food after you eat it
The discovery of insulin: what happens when the body makes none
In January 1922, doctors in Toronto gave a dying 13-year-old boy a shot made from the pancreas of animals, and he got better. What was missing from his body, and what did the shot put back?
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1
For thousands of years, doctors knew an illness where people were always thirsty, passed huge amounts of urine and grew thin, however much they ate. Doctors even tasted their urine: it was sweet. The name says it: diabetes mellitus, "passing through" and "sweet as honey".
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2
In 1889, in Strasbourg, Oskar Minkowski removed the pancreas of a dog, to study digestion. Soon the dog had sugar in its urine: the same illness. So the pancreas held the key.
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