1922 | Medicine
Medicine
Insulin gives diabetics a new lease on life (see Sharpey-Schafer, 1916). University of Toronto medical researchers Frederick G. (Grant) Banting, 30, and Charles H. (Herbert) Best, 22, isolated the hormone (they called it "isletin") from canine pancreatic juices last year while their mentor John J. R. McLeod was on holiday in his native Scotland. He suggested on his return that they use Sharpey-Schafer's term insuline, turned over purification of it to a trained biochemist, and he organized an entire laboratory to help Banting and Best pursue their research, providing them with 10 dogs for their experiments. They use the hormone January 1 at the Hospital for Sick Children to save the life of patient Leonard Thompson, 14, whose weight has fallen to 65 pounds. He is close to death, but after injecting themselves with the hormone to make sure it is safe they inject young Leonard. After some initial problems related to impurities, his blood sugar level drops, his energy level rises, and he begins to regain weight (he will survive until 1935, when he will succumb to pneumonia after a motorcycle accident). The university will license Eli Lilly & Co. to make the first commercial insulin, and although diabetes remains incurable physicians now have a treatment for it other than diet restrictions (see 1924; 1937).
The U.S. death rate from diphtheria falls to 14.6 per 100,000, down from 43.3 in 1900; from influenza and pneumonia to 88.3, down from 181.5 (and much higher in the 1918-1919 epidemic); from infant diarrhea and enteritis to 32.5, down from 108.8; from tuberculosis to 97, down from 201.9; from typhoid and paratyphoid fever to 7.5, down from 35.9; but from cancer the death rate is 86.8 per 100,000, up from 63 in 1900; from heart disease 154.7, up from 123.1; and from diabetes mellitus 91.7, up from 18.4.
French bacteriologists Albert Calmette and Camille Guérin use attenuated tubercle bacilli to vaccinate newborn infants at the Charité Hospital Paris (see 1908). Now 59 and 49, respectively, they came to the conclusion last year that they had produced a bacillus that was harmless to humans but retained its power to stimulate antibody formation. Their BCG (bacillus Calmette-Guérin) vaccine will be adopted in France, the Scandinavian countries, and elsewhere, but British and U.S. health authorities will question its safety and efficacy (see Lübeck disaster, 1930).
Rangoon-born physician Gordon (Stifler) Seagrave, 24, opens a jungle hospital at Namkhan, Burma, that he will continue until his death in 1965.
Psychiatrist Hermann Rorschach of inkblot personality test fame dies at Herisau, Switzerland, April 2 at age 37; patent medicine magnate Charles H. Fletcher of Fletcher's Castoria fame at Orange, N.J., April 9 at age 84, having made a fortune from the formula that he purchased from a physician and promoted as a remedy for children; Nobel pathologist-parasitologist Alphonse Laveran dies at his native Paris May 18 at age 76; biochemist Jokichi Takamine at New York July 22 at age 67; Johns Hopkins surgeon William S. Halsted at Baltimore September 7 at age 69.
Listerine fights halitosis, say advertisements for the 38-year-old Lambert Pharmaceutical Co. of St. Louis, which has been making the antiseptic solution since 1879 and marketed it as an over-the-counter oral hygiene product since 1914. Advertising man Milton Fuessle has suggested the new appeal, a clipping from the British medical journal Lancet reveals that the medical term for bad breath is halitosis, and founder's son Gerard B. (Barnes) Lambert, 34, seizes upon the word as the basis for advertising. Lambert will take Fuessle to New York, open an advertising agency under the name Lambert and Feasley (he says Fuessle is too hard to pronounce), and huckster Listerine with human-interest-story advertisements, claiming that the product kills millions of germs on contact (although the bacteria in any human mouth number in the billions).