"If you can live until we get the new stuff from Toronto, we might save you," wrote the late Dr. H. Rawle Geyelin of New York's Presbyterian Hospital to a diabetic patient in the summer of 1922. The new stuff was insulin, just produced by Toronto's young Dr. Frederick Banting (with Medical Student Charles Best), who got the idea one sleepless night after trying to get his mind off a 28-day lack of patients.
Last week Dr. Geyelin's patient, Fruit Farmer Russell Kohl, 66, of Newburgh, N.Y., celebrated his 36th year of useful life through insulin. Patient Kohl first developed diabetes at...