100 years since the first diabetes patient treated with insulin in England
It has been 100 years since the first person in England was treated with insulin, changing the course of diabetes treatment in the country.
The milestone in medicine took place at the University of Sheffield’s Medical School in 1923, on a patient called Sir Stuart Goodwin, who was in the Sheffield steel industry and philanthropist.
At that time, a diabetes diagnosis was essentially a “death sentence”, with life expectancy at one to two years at most.
The only treatments for diabetes time were starvation diets, such as the diet which restricted a patient’s intake to as little as 400 calories in 24 hours.
