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Before modern medicine, a diagnosis of type 1 diabetes was almost always fatal within a couple of years, until a discovery in the early 1920s changed everything.
Insulin is the hormone Canadian researchers Frederick Banting and Charles Best isolated in 1921-22 at the University of Toronto. Insulin helps cells absorb sugar from the bloodstream for energy; in type 1 diabetes the pancreas stops producing it, so sugar builds up dangerously in the blood while cells starve. Extracting insulin from animal pancreases and injecting it into patients meant this process could finally be replaced from outside the body.
Adrenaline controls the 'fight or flight' stress response, and cortisol regulates stress and metabolism over longer timescales — neither controls blood sugar uptake the way insulin does, so neither could have treated diabetes.
Before this discovery, doctors could do little more than put diabetic children on near-starvation diets to delay death by months; insulin's arrival within a couple of years turned some of medicine's most hopeless patients into people who could expect full lives.
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