Breakthrough

Breakthrough: Elizabeth Hughes, the Discovery of Insulin, and the Making of a Medical Miracle [Kindle Edition]

Author: Thea Cooper | Language: English | ISBN: B003P9XM4Y | Format: PDF, EPUB

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Breakthrough: Elizabeth Hughes, the Discovery of Insulin, and the Making of a Medical Miracle
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It is 1919 and Elizabeth Hughes, the eleven-year-old daughter of America's most-distinguished jurist and politician, Charles Evans Hughes, has been diagnosed with juvenile diabetes. It is essentially a death sentence. The only accepted form of treatment – starvation – whittles her down to forty-five pounds skin and bones. Miles away, Canadian researchers Frederick Banting and Charles Best manage to identify and purify insulin from animal pancreases – a miracle soon marred by scientific jealousy, intense business competition and fistfights. In a race against time and a ravaging disease, Elizabeth becomes one of the first diabetics to receive insulin injections – all while its discoverers and a little known pharmaceutical company struggle to make it available to the rest of the world.

Relive the heartwarming true story of the discovery of insulin as it’s never been told before. Written with authentic detail and suspense, and featuring walk-ons by William Howard Taft, Woodrow Wilson, and Eli Lilly himself, among many others.

Direct download links available for Breakthrough: Elizabeth Hughes, the Discovery of Insulin, and the Making of a Medical Miracle [Kindle Edition]

• File Size: 544 KB
• Print Length: 336 pages
• Publisher: St. Martin's Press; Reprint edition (September 14, 2010)
• Sold by: Macmillan
• Language: English
• ASIN: B003P9XM4Y
• Text-to-Speech: Enabled
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  Not Enabled
• Lending: Not Enabled
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #113,937 Paid in Kindle Store (See Top 100 Paid in Kindle Store)
  • #35 in Kindle Store > Kindle eBooks > Nonfiction > Professional & Technical > Medical eBooks > Special Topics > History
  • #74 in Kindle Store > Kindle eBooks > Nonfiction > Professional & Technical > Medical eBooks > Diseases > Diabetes

This book details the discovery of insulin and how that discovery affected the lives of Elizabeth Hughes and her family. Cooper, a playwright, and Ainsberg, an author, put together this book as a collaborative project. The book juxtaposes the details of the discovery and development of insulin as a therapy for diabetes with the diagnosis and subsequent health decline of Elizabeth Hughes, daughter of Charles Evans Hughes. Elizabeth Hughes was first diagnosed with diabetes in April 1919 at the age of 12. At that time, the best therapy for diabetes was Allen's starvation treatment, in which patients were put on a strict dietary regime which kept them on a knife's edge between sugar poisoning and outright starvation; indeed, as Cooper and Ainsberg note in this book, many of Allen's patients succumbed to starvation. Allen's severe dietary restrictions were no cure for diabetes, but merely a stopgap measure, with the hope that it would enable patients to survive long enough for a diabetes cure to be found. Elizabeth Hughes was one of the Allen's most famous patients, and one of the first for whom the starvation gamble paid off when insulin treatments began to be tested on human patients in 1922.

This book delves into the gritty details of the discovery and development of insulin, how a young doctor named Frederick Banting with no research experience but a unique idea was able to persuade veteran Toronto researcher Charles Best to let him try a summer project in his lab. Cooper and Ainsberg relate the details of Banting and Best's subsequent strife-filled collaboration. They also discuss the family background of Elizabeth Hughes and her well-known father, Charles Evans Hughes.

When I was a mere eleven years old, my parents noticed my brother attempting to smuggle a pitcher of water up to his bedroom. He admitted that he had been drinking a lot of late, and my parents became alarmed. Rushing him off to the hospital he was quickly diagnosed with type 1 diabetes. It was a strange and frightening time for the whole family, and I read everything I could on the disease to get an understanding of what was happening to my brother.

This book, takes the reader back in time to that amazing transitional time in 1922 when the diagnosis of diabetes changed from being a sentence of death, when the discovery of insulin gave so many people world-wide back their lives. It looks at the victims of the disease, focusing primarily on Elizabeth Hughes, daughter of the Secretary of State of the United States, and looks at the researchers whose activities resulted in the most important breakthrough in the treatment of the disease.

First off, I must agree that this book does take the barebones story of what happened in 1922 and before, fleshes it out with a good deal of "imagined" detail. Therefore this book is probably not terribly useful to someone who wants a reliable and scholarly history.

What this book is is more of what I would call a "popular history," that is, a book written to tell the story of the discovery of insulin, but in an entertaining and engaging manner. I for one found this to be a very informative and entertaining book. The early part that dealt with what families went through before the discovery of insulin was quite literally heartbreaking. And I must admit that when I got to the part where peoples lives were being returned to them (as opposed to living in a concentration camp-like sanitarium), I quite literally got tears in my eyes.

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