"From the Beaker to the Bedside" - Banting House Museum is the Birthplace of Insulin

2021 marks 100 years since the discovery of insulin and we could think of no better place to hear the story of how it happened than from the folks at Banting House. That's literally the house where Sir Frederick Banting woke up with the idea that led to this life saving discovery. Curator Grant Maltman shares stories and takes us on a bit of an audio tour of the House. He explains how Dr. Banting got started, made the discovery (with help of course) and what the museum is doing to mark the occasion. It's a very interactive museum with everything from a letter writing campaign to Dr. Banting that's still going on, to a display of diabetes tattoos from around the world. More about Banting House Stacey also shares her idea to mark 100 years of insulin - with your help! This podcast is not intended as medical advice. If you have those kinds of questions, please contact your health care provider. Check out Stacey's book: The World's Worst Diabetes Mom! Join the Diabetes Connections Facebook Group! Sign up for our newsletter here ----- Use this link to get one free download and one free month of Audible, available to Diabetes Connections listeners! ----- Get the App and listen to Diabetes Connections wherever you go! Click here for iPhone Click here for Android Episode Transcription below: Stacey Simms 0:00 Diabetes Connections is brought to you by Dario Health: Manage your blood glucose levels, increase your possibilities; by Gvoke Hypopen: the first premixed auto injector for very low blood sugar; and by Dexcom: take control of your diabetes and live life to the fullest with Dexcom. Announcer 0:21 This is Diabetes Connections with Stacey Simms. Stacey Simms 0:27 This week, we're talking to the curator of Banting House, which is known as the birthplace of insulin. It's literally the house where Sir Frederick Banting woke up with the idea that led to this life-saving discovery. Grant Maltman 0:40 We're celebrating the 100th anniversary of the discovery of insulin. 100 years later, we have better insulin, what we still don't have is anything better than insulin. And that's what makes this place so important. It's why people come here, you know, we hear the words, like pilgrimage, we have people refer to us as a \\"Diabetes Mecca.\\" Stacey Simms 0:59 Grant Maltman shares stories and takes us on a bit of an audio tour of the house. We're also cooking up an idea to mark this century of insulin anniversary, but I'm going to need your help. This podcast is not intended as medical advice. If you have those kinds of questions, please contact your health care provider. Welcome to another week of the show, always so glad to have you here we aim to educate and inspire about diabetes with a focus on people who use insulin, and Banting House is one of those places I would really like to visit. Hey, everybody, I'm Stacey Simms. I am your host, my son was diagnosed more than 14 years ago with Type One and my husband lives with Type Two. And you know, obviously, insulin is incredibly important to us and everybody listening to the show, as you'll hear people travelled to the museum, not only to learn more about history, but also in the hopes that they will be inspired, with a bit of an aha moment, like Dr. Banting was. The curator, Grant Maltman will take us through more of the exhibits and the history. I'm not going to do that here. But I do want to let you know, there is a brief YouTube video that I've put out that goes along with this episode, you're gonna hear almost at the end of the interview, Grant turns the camera on and takes us through part of the exhibit. So you can listen to that. And we really get the idea, but I thought you might also want to see it. And so that's on YouTube as well. I will link that up in the episode. And it's always a good way to mention that we have links and information for every episode at Diabetes-connections.com, in addition to the show notes in whatever podcast app you may be listening to, but some of those apps don't really show the notes very well. And they don't hyperlink and all that good stuff. So you can always go to Diabetes-connections.com. And please stick around after the interview. I want to run an idea by you for kind of our own way on the show here, for you to take part of marking 100 years since Dr. Banting's discovery. So stick around for that. But first Diabetes Connections is brought to you by Dario Health. And over the years I find we manage diabetes better when we're thinking less about all the stuff of diabetes tasks. And that's why I love partnering with people who take the load off on things like ordering supplies, so I can really focus on Benny. The Dario diabetes success plan is all about you, all the strips and lancets you need delivered to your door, one-on- -one coaching so you can meet your milestones, weekly insights into your trends, with suggestions on how to succeed. Get the diabetes management plan that works with you and for you. Dario's published studies demonstrate high impact clinical results, find out more. Go to mydario.com/diabetes-connections. Grant, thanks so much for joining me. I'm really interested to hear more about your story and share about the Banting House. Thanks for being here today. Grant Maltman 3:54 Oh, my pleasure. This is going to be fun. Stacey Simms 3:56 Yeah. All right. Well, let's just start with the, you know, very generalities. Can you tell you what Banting House is all about? Grant Maltman 4:02 Well, Banting House since 1923, has been known as the birthplace of insulin. It's Frederick Banting's former home where he came up with the idea that led to the discovery of insulin. It was purchased by Diabetes Canada in 1981, declared a National Historic Site of Canada in 1997, and are now full museum open to the public. Stacey Simms 4:24 When you say the birthplace of insulin, tell me the story. What does that mean? Grant Maltman 4:28 Well, this is always history. So everyone knows or you know, we'd like to help everyone know, that the discovery of insulin occurred at the University of Toronto during the summer of 1921. Like every great story, that's neither the beginning nor the end. And so the origin story for insulin in this context anyways, is this house. So Frederick Banting is a struggling general practitioner in London, Ontario. After the First World War, he couldn't get a job in Toronto as a house surgeon. So he came here to set up a practice and this wasn't an \\"open it and they will come\\" scenario. He does everything wrong, he moves to a city where he doesn't know anyone. He doesn't take over a retire doctor's office. His office hours are terrible, 1-3 in the afternoon, seven to eight in the evening, his location isn't a great spot to set up as a private practice, it's not a high traffic area. You could put your name on the front window, but there's big silver Maple up front, and no one's going to see it. So he's literally 0 for 4, or even the phonebook. He failed there too, the phone book was printed in April, and he doesn't move here until June. So he opens his practice on the first of July 1920. His first patient arrives 28 days later. And according to his memoir, it's not even a real medical problem in 1920. In Ontario, we're still under the Prohibition Act. And according to Banting's memoir, anyways, he writes an illegal alcohol prescription, illegal alcohol sale. So our great Canadian hero starts off his career as a modern day bootlegger. While the practice slowly starts to grow, it's not enough to pay his bills. And so he takes a job at Western University at the Medical School where he's literally a day or two ahead of the students, he takes this opportunity because of the income. Each lab that he does is $2 an hour, which is great, considering his entire July income was $6. So three labs in the early fall of 1920. He's gonna equal his entire July income, things are progressing well. And towards the end of October, he's asked to prepare a lecture on the subject of the pancreas and diabetes. And one of the the myths around the discouraged insulin is that Dr. Banting was on this lifelong quest to find a cure for this disease because a 14 year old boy or girl, friend or cousin, depending on his telling his story, the key is, this, it's a young child, had diabetes, that Banting knew. This child died, \\"Okay, well, I'm going to grow up, I'm going to go to medical school and find a treatment for diabetes,\\" not the case at all. He's scared to death because he has to give a lecture on a subject he knows very little about, he had never treated the patient with diabetes, he knew that the only treatment was, was the Allen diet was the standard diet, the starvation diet. Once you're on that diet, your life expectancy is about six months to two years. So we can't do much of a lecture on four or five senses. So on the 30th of October, he reads everything he can and prepares his lecture. And then that evening, when he goes to bed, he takes to bed his surgical journal. He always likes to read himself to sleep. And he opens up this journal by Moses Baron. And it's a survey article on diabetes and diabetes research and what a great opportunity to read this, perhaps there's something in this that I can incorporate into my lecture. And so he reads the article, turns out the light and goes to sleep at 2am. After a night of restless sleep, he rises for bed and puts to paper 25 words that will change course of diabetes research and diabetes history. It was a restless night of restless sleep. \\"After the lecture and the article been chasing each other in my mind for some time, the idea occurred to me. I got up, I wrote down, I couldn't stop thinking about it. Those 25 words leaked that first crude farm insulin 10 months later, after only about 12 weeks of experiments.\\" Stacey Simms 8:16 So I had never heard that he was interested in this as a little, you know, as a young kid, but I had heard about him, you know, waking up in the middl

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