Leonard Thompson

December 2nd, 1921.

Leonard Thompson, a 14-year-old Canadian boy, checks in to Toronto General Hospital.

He's in critical condition.

He was completely apathetic because he was so starved and so ill.

Part

one, 25 words.

It's summer 1920, a little over a year before Leonard Thompson will find himself in that hospital ward.

A young general surgeon has just opened a private practice in a little house in London, Ontario, Canada.

It was a monumental breakthrough.

Yeah, they purified this crude extract and injected it into a 14-year-old boy, Leonard Thompson, who was slipping into a diabetic coma and was literally days away from death.

The historical accounts of that ward are chilling.

Doctors went bed to bed, injecting these dying, emaciated children with this new purified extract, and before they even reached the end of the room, the first children injected were already waking up from their comas.

One famous dog, Marjorie, survived about 70 days.

On January 11, 1922, they injected a 13-year-old boy named Leonard Thompson at Toronto General Hospital.

He weighed about 65 pounds.

That first extract was impure, so his blood sugar dropped only modestly, and the ketones in his blood persisted, and he developed an abscess at the injection site.