The Banting House is a museum in the city of London, Ontario dedicated to the life and work of Frederick Banting, a Canadian medical scientist who was largely responsible for the discovery of insulin and its subsequent effect on the treatment of diabetes. The large yellow brick house that the museum was built into is located at 442 Adelaide Street, close to downtown London; since the 1920s, the house has been known across the world as “The Birthplace of Insulin.” The museum has been located in the house since 1984, and the back of the house is given over to the operations of the Canadian Diabetes Association.
Diabetes
To properly understand the importance of Frederick Banting in medical science, it’s important first to understand the disease of diabetes. Diabetes is really a collection of disorders, all of which revolve around improper blood sugar levels. Some symptoms of these disorders include the frequent need to urinate, as well as increased levels of hunger and thirst; long-term problems can include heart disease, stroke, kidney disease, foot ulcers, and eye damage. Acute problems associated with diabetes can include ketoacidosis, hyperglycemia, and death. The root cause of the disorder is insulin: either the pancreas doesn’t produce enough insulin or the body’s cells are not reacting to insulin in the normal fashion.
The disease comes in three major forms. Type 1 Diabetes (formerly known as “juvenile diabetes”) stems directly from the pancreas’ inability to produce enough insulin to regulate blood sugar. Type 2 Diabetes (formerly known as “adult-onset diabetes”) is a disorder where the body fails to respond appropriately to insulin production. Unlike Type 1 Diabetes, there are known causes for Type 2 Diabetes; typically it’s an outgrowth of poor diet and a lack of exercise. The third form, gestational diabetes, is a complication that arises from certain pregnancies; no previous diabetic conditions are necessary to develop gestational diabetes and the symptoms often clear up after the pregnancy. Treatment of Type 1 requires regular insulin injections; Type 2 can be treated with drugs other than insulin, and also with a balanced diet and regular exercise. Today there are around 425 million people suffering from diabetes worldwide, which represents 8.8% of the global adult population; this amount is trending upwards in recent decades, as well.
Diabetes is a very old disease as well. The Egyptians wrote about it in 1500 BCE, discussing the overly frequent need to urinate; at the time, Egyptian doctors recommended “a measuring glass filled with water from the Bird Pond, elderberry, fibres of the asit plant, fresh milk, beer-swill, flower of the cucumber, and green dates.” This treatment, outlined in the Ebers papyrus, would have done nothing to solve the underlying problems of the disease. It did, however, show that Egyptian doctors knew that the disease had something to do with diet, although even that would have been useless for Type 1 diabetics. At the height of the Roman Empire, the disease was rare although noted by doctors across the world. Indian physicians recorded the disease as madhumeha, “honey urine”, and noted that diabetic urine would attract ants; Chinese physicians called it xiao ke, “wasting and thirsting.” Indian physicians were also the first to note that there were two types, referencing the categories that modern science also discovered.
In the West, the collapse of the Roman Empire and the intellectual stagnation that resulted prevented much further research from being done until after the rise of modern nation-states. The intellectual blossoming of the Renaissance and the Enlightenment resulted in experimental work being done on diabetes again in the 17th Century. Thomas Willis, an Oxford University doctor, made the first modern connection between the disease and the sweetness of urine; Matthew Dobson, another English doctor, built upon Willis’ research in 1776 to show that there was actual sugar in the urine of diabetics, which drove physicians in the right direction for further research. Oskar Minkowski, at the University of Strasbourg, discovered in 1889 that the pancreas regulated blood sugar; his research on dogs and their pancreas led directly to the discoveries by Banting.
Frederick Banting
Frederick Banting was born November 14th, 1891 on a farm near Alliston, Ontario. He attended public schools in Alliston and, after graduating, was accepted to Victoria College, a subsidiary of the University of Toronto, in 1910 for a bachelor’s program in General Arts. He failed his first year of university and nearly washed out altogether; he petitioned to join the medical program at the university in 1912 and was accepted following a series of interviews. When the First World War broke out in 1914 he tried to join up to fight in Europe but was turned away because of his poor eyesight. This was at the beginning, of course, when all sides in the European conflict thought the war would be over by Christmas; as it settled into an apocalyptic stalemate in France, recruitment for the armies ramped up. Banting was accepted in by 1915, especially since he was undergoing medical training and there was a severe need for doctors on the Western Front. His entire graduating class was actually fast-tracked so that they could get as many as possible out to the war; Banting reported for duty the day after graduating. He was a medic across the Western Front for the rest of the war before finally being pulled out in 1918 following the Battle of Cambrai. That battle, which featured some of the earliest use of tanks in warfare, was particularly brutal even by First World War standards. In the midst of the carnage, and despite being wounded himself, Banting continued to patch and mend and save gravely injured soldiers for sixteen hours until another medic forced him to stop. For these actions, he was awarded the Military Cross for heroism in 1919.
His license to practice medicine and surgery was granted by the Royal College of Physicians in London, England, and he returned to Canada to finish his medical training. He studied orthopaedics and then joined the Hospital For Sick Children in Toronto as a resident. He was unable to get a permanent placement on the staff at the hospital, however, and after sticking it out as a resident through 1920 he decided that it would be better for him to pack up and move to London, Ontario. Fresh in the city, he opened up a general medical practice that went largely nowhere. With bills to pay, Banting accepted some part-time teaching positions at Western University, lecturing on orthopaedics and anthropology.
It was during this time that Banting began his way toward a major breakthrough. On November 1st, 1920 he was slated to give a lecture on the pancreas to a class of medical students at Western. In preparation, he’d read through a number of medical papers on the pancreas; one research avenue he went down was on the scourge of diabetes, and the potential that a pancreatic hormone named insulin was the key to managing it. A number of these papers described the difficulty of extracting usable insulin from a living pancreas, discussing the problem of destroying insulin by grinding up pancreatic cells. On Halloween night, hours before his lecture, Banting was trying to sleep at his house, which is now the Banting House Museum. Around two in the morning he arose from bed, his head buzzing, unable to sleep, and scrawled out “Diabetus”. Ligate pancreatic ducts of dog. Keep dogs alive till acini degenerate leaving islets. Try to isolate the internal secretion of these and relieve glycosuria.” It was 25 words that would change history.
Banting moved to Toronto in 1921 to teach pharmacology at the University of Toronto and continued his research into the pancreas and the viability of extracting insulin and using it to treat diabetes. He requested laboratory space from Dr. J.J.R. Macleod who granted the request, although with reservations. As a lecturer doing research at the university, Banting rated a research assistant – Dr. Charles Best, who was at the time a medical student at the university. Within scant months Banting and Best managed to isolate insulin; in conjunction with Dr. James Collip, the insulin was refined and prepared for clinical trials. Those clinical trials were an immediate success; diabetes was finally a disease that could be managed, and those suffering from it could live long, fulfilling lives. Mass producing insulin proved to not be a problem at all; at first Banting proved it could be harvested from the pancreas of fetal calves, and then later from adult pigs and cows. The meat industry, a major part of the economy of Toronto, would prove to be a valuable source of insulin.
As for the discovery itself, Banting proved to be a selfless researcher whose goal was to help humanity rather than his own wallet. The patent on insulin was sold to the University of Toronto for $1, with Banting stating that “insulin does not belong to me, it belongs to the world.” Rather than live off the proceeds of a patent, Banting chose to go back into private practice, this time advising and treating diabetic patients on how to use insulin to manage their disease. This private practice was quite a bit more lucrative than his previous one; winning the Nobel Prize in 1923 made for extremely effective advertising, as it turns out. It also didn’t hurt that his practice gained some high profile clients early on. One of the first was Elizabeth Hughes Gossett, who was the daughter of Charles Evan Hughes, at the time the United States Secretary of State.
In addition to discovering how to extract insulin and use it to treat diabetes, Banting lived his best life. He worked on figuring out how to prevent pilots from blacking out during high-G maneuvers and helped Wilbur Franks with the development of the G-Suit, that iconic mask-and-suit outfit that fighter pilots wear (and that led to the development of the space suits). He worked on better treatments for mustard gas burns, which proved to be helpful in subsequent decades. He called the Hudson’s Bay Company out on their practices, which were inadvertently spreading influenza to vulnerable indigenous populations in northern Canada, with devastating results. He took up painting (starting on the back of dry cleaning inserts in London), eventually becoming friends with A.Y. Jackson and Lawren Harris of the Group of Seven. For the most part he refused to accept payment for his work, however, preferring instead to exchange paintings.
Museum
When Banting died in a plane crash over Newfoundland in 1941, it was well before his time; the Banting House Museum is a testament to his life and work. Entry is $6 for adults, $5 for students and seniors, and $3 for children. Family rates can apply at $15, and group rates are available at a flat rate of $70 (with a minimum of 15 people). The museum is open Tuesday through Saturday from noon until 4 PM.
The Canadian Diabetes Association purchased the house in 1981 for use as the local London office of the organization. Previous to then the Banting house had been used as a boarding house, and then as a local real estate office. In 1984 the Canadian Diabetes Association moved their offices to the newer additions that had been added to the back of the house after Banting sold it and turned the original part of the house into a museum honouring the “birthplace of insulin.” In 1989, the Queen Mother visited Canada and came to London. She performed the unveiling of the bronze statue that depicts Banting writing down his 25 word hypothesis, and kindled for the first time the Flame of Hope. The Flame of Hope, which stands next to the Banting House, burns eternally until such a time arrives wherein diabetes has finally been cured. When that happens, the medical science team responsible will be flown to London (or driven over, in the case of a regionally located team) and given the task of extinguishing the flame. In addition, there is a time capsule buried at the site in 1991 that will be unearthed by that same medical science team.
The Banting House has been, since 1999, a Canadian Heritage Site, and as such it is the Canadian Diabetes Association’s mission to preserve and honour the memory of both Banting and the house in which he came up with his idea on how to extract insulin. For those interested in the history of medicine, the history of London, or the history of the man himself, it’s well worth a trip to the Banting House Museum to soak in all of the artifacts that together make the story of how one man struggled to make something of himself in the aftermath of war and chaos and ended up changing the course of history entirely.