Leonard Thompson (diabetic)

Leonard Thompson (17 July 1908 – 20 April 1935) was the first person to have received an injection of insulin as a treatment for type 1 diabetes.

Thompson was first treated at the Hospital for Sick Children before being transferred to the care of physicians Andrew Almon Fletcher, Duncan Archibald Graham, and Walter Ruggles Campbell.

After a refined process was developed by James Collip to improve the canine pancreas extract, the second dosage was successfully delivered to the young patient 12 days after the first.

[2] Thompson showed signs of improved health and went on to live 13 more years taking doses of insulin, before dying of pneumonia at age 26.

[3][4] Until insulin was made clinically available, a diagnosis of type 1 diabetes was a death sentence, more or less quickly (usually within months, and frequently within weeks or days).