Breakthrough: Elizabeth Hughes, the Discovery of Insulin, and the Making of a Medical Mirac [Hardcover]

When I was a mere eleven years old, my parents noticed my brother attempting to smuggle a pitcher of water up to his bedroom. He admitted that he had been drinking a lot of late, and my parents became alarmed. Rushing him off to the hospital he was quickly diagnosed with type 1 diabetes. It was a strange and frightening time for the whole family, and I read everything I could on the disease to get an understanding of what was happening to my brother.

This book, takes the reader back in time to that amazing transitional time in 1922 when the diagnosis of diabetes changed from being a sentence of death, when the discovery of insulin gave so many people world-wide back their lives. It looks at the victims of the disease, focusing primarily on Elizabeth Hughes, daughter of the Secretary of State of the United States, and looks at the researchers whose activities resulted in the most important breakthrough in the treatment of the disease.

First off, I must agree that this book does take the barebones story of what happened in 1922 and before, fleshes it out with a good deal of "imagined" detail. Therefore this book is probably not terribly useful to someone who wants a reliable and scholarly history.

What this book is is more of what I would call a "popular history," that is, a book written to tell the story of the discovery of insulin, but in an entertaining and engaging manner. I for one found this to be a very informative and entertaining book. The early part that dealt with what families went through before the discovery of insulin was quite literally heartbreaking. And I must admit that when I got to the part where peoples lives were being returned to them (as opposed to living in a concentration camp-like sanitarium), I quite literally got tears in my eyes.

Yes, I really enjoyed this book, and am very glad that I read it. As someone at least somewhat knowledgeable about diabetes, I was interested to learn about what diabetes was like before there was insulin, and how much better things are today. I don't hesitate to recommend this book.

This book details the discovery of insulin and how that discovery affected the lives of Elizabeth Hughes and her family. Cooper, a playwright, and Ainsberg, an author, put together this book as a collaborative project. The book juxtaposes the details of the discovery and development of insulin as a therapy for diabetes with the diagnosis and subsequent health decline of Elizabeth Hughes, daughter of Charles Evans Hughes. Elizabeth Hughes was first diagnosed with diabetes in April 1919 at the age of 12. At that time, the best therapy for diabetes was Allen's starvation treatment, in which patients were put on a strict dietary regime which kept them on a knife's edge between sugar poisoning and outright starvation; indeed, as Cooper and Ainsberg note in this book, many of Allen's patients succumbed to starvation. Allen's severe dietary restrictions were no cure for diabetes, but merely a stopgap measure, with the hope that it would enable patients to survive long enough for a diabetes cure to be found. Elizabeth Hughes was one of the Allen's most famous patients, and one of the first for whom the starvation gamble paid off when insulin treatments began to be tested on human patients in 1922.

This book delves into the gritty details of the discovery and development of insulin, how a young doctor named Frederick Banting with no research experience but a unique idea was able to persuade veteran Toronto researcher Charles Best to let him try a summer project in his lab. Cooper and Ainsberg relate the details of Banting and Best's subsequent strife-filled collaboration. They also discuss the family background of Elizabeth Hughes and her well-known father, Charles Evans Hughes. They consider the ethical questions of Elizabeth's treatments with Allen and Banting, and conjecture some of the ethical questions that Charles Evans Hughes may have been faced with when making decisions concerning his daughter's treatments.

The book provides informative details about the bleak situation for diabetes patients before 1920, and a glimpse into the difficulties faced by many collaborative research efforts. I found the focus on Elizabeth Hughes a bit misleading though; rather than being the first patient successfully treated with insulin injections, she was more a famous exemplar rather than a pioneer. The book is rife with descriptions of conversations and mental states; in looking for references to describe how the authors may have been able to uncover such intimate material, I found instead that they had made it up. Indeed, one of the book's most important scenes depicts an ethical quandary faced by Charles Evans Hughes, yet in the sources, the authors write "The phone call from Charles Evans Hughes to President Falconer at the University of Toronto is imagined, as is Antoinette's urging him to it." If such details were invented for dramatic emphasis, then this book must be approached as a work of fiction, not of medical history.

Up until about 1922, anyone diagnosed with Type I diabetes was destined to live a short life. From the time of diagnosis until death from the disease was measured in months, not years.

This book tells the story of the first patient to receive insulin therapy and the circumstances of how it all happened. That first patient was a young girl named Elizabeth Hughes, who died in 1981 at the age of 73.

It is a story of parents trying to come to terms with the inevitable death of their daughter and their decision to allow the experimental use of insulin on her.

A remarkable story, and a testament to the dedication and persistence of a Doctor striving for a life-saving treatment for diabetes.

Recommended!

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