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
