Why medical history is the best history

Spectator contributors were asked: Which moment from history seems most significant or interesting? Here is Justin Webb’s answer:

A gloomy January day in the Canadian city of Toronto. The year is 1922 and a 14-year-old boy called Leonard Thompson is lying in the hospital. Leonard weighs under five stone. He has been on a starvation diet to try to keep his death at bay but he is close now to the end. Every Type 1 diabetic in human history has so far faced the same death; with no working pancreas they faded away, their bodies unable to cope with the processing of food. 

But on 11 January of that year Leonard was selected for a lone experiment. He was injected with ‘a murky, light-brown liquid containing much sediment, which dissolved to a considerable extent on being warmed’. It was insulin, discovered and refined by two doctors, Frederick Banting and Charles Best. Actually, not much refined: the first injection seemed to do no good and left a lesion on the boy’s skin. 

But a few days later, they tried with a more purified version. Leonard was feeling better within minutes. Days later he left hospital. He lived for another 13 years. 

Millions since have lived on as a result. Of course, there are other medical wonders — the coronavirus vaccines among them — that change the course of human history. But my son Sam would not be alive and at university without Banting and Best. Henry Slade would not be gliding across try lines for England. Theresa May, a late comer to Type 1, would have faded too. Medical history is the best sort. These are Trafalgars for the whole human race.