Safe Havens

“I can do it!”

When Jim Havens was 14, he wanted to grow up to be an artist, but now he was too ill to sit up, much less hold a paintbrush. It was May 1922, and he was dying on the family sofa in Rochester, N.Y. He was skin-and-bones, gripped with pains in his legs, terribly hungry, and subsisting on a near starvation diet ordered by his doctor.

Eight years had passed since Jim had received his death sentence—diabetes. In 1914 when he was diagnosed, most people died within weeks or months of learning their fate. Few survived more than a year or two. Yet the strong-willed Jim had managed to finish school and three years of college.

His family’s doctor had given up. Nothing else could be done. Perhaps Jim was ready to go, too. But his father James was a battler. A former congressman, he was the chief attorney at the Eastman Kodak company, the manufacturer of film and incredibly popular and inexpensive “Brownie” cameras. Ever since his son had fallen ill, James had researched the disease and communicated with anyone and everyone to try to save his son’s life.

            Diabetes has afflicted mankind since ancient times and was known to physicians in India, China, and Egypt as early as 1500 B.C. Its symptoms include excessive thirst and frequent urination. In fact, the word ‘diabetes’ comes from a Greek term meaning to “pass through.”

Sugar killer

 It was the sugar killer. Doctors noticed that ants were attracted to the urine of those with diabetes due to its high sugar content. The technical name of the disease is ‘diabetes mellitus,’ the latter word being a derivation of the Latin word for honey.

“The patient is short-lived…The melting is rapid, the death speedy,” wrote the 2^nd century AD Greek physician Aretaeus of Cappadocia. Thomas Willis, a British physician in the 1700s, called diabetes “the pissing evil.” But like so many physicians before him, he had no idea “why the urine [of those afflicted] is wonderfully sweet like sugar or honey”

It was not until 1889 when experiments with dogs led doctors to understand that the disease had something to do with the pancreas. In 1920 Frederick Banting, a young Toronto surgeon, became curious about the relationship between the pancreas and how the body processes carbohydrates and sugar.

He and fellow physician Charles Best extracted material from an area of in the pancreases of dogs called the islets of Langerhans. They named the resulting processed liquid ‘insulin’ meaning “of the islands” in Latin.

It so happened that George Snowball, the manager of a Kodak store in Toronto, visited Havens one day in his Rochester office. Desperate, Havens asked Snowball if he could help. He said he would ask a fellow golfer who was a doctor at the University of Toronto’s medical school.

Cajoled a few doses

He gave Snowball no hope—not a chance in Hell, perhaps--but the manager was persistent. He met other physicians at the med school. It turned out that one of them---Frederick Banting--was experimenting with dogs and had isolated the newly named substance insulin.

When Snowball and Havens learned that it was being used experimentally in Canada on humans, Havens went into high gear, and the Havens’ family doctor cajoled a few doses from Banting to give to young Jim.

Even when there were no positive results, Snowball wouldn’t give up. He told Banting he would personally pay his air fare if he would fly to Rochester. Upon arriving, he began injecting Jim with larger doses every two hours. After many hours and many injections, Jim’s test results showed there was no sugar in his blood.

“How do you feel?” Banting asked the young man. “Try sitting up.”

At first, Jim didn’t think he could. At last he lifted himself off the sofa. “I can do it!” he exclaimed. “I do feel better!”

That day for lunch he ate a normal meal, and the pains in his legs had vanished.

Jim achieved his goal of becoming an artist and lived to be 60. He became a painter, illustrator, and sculptor renowned for his wildlife scenes, and today his work is in the collections of the Metropolitan Museum in New York and the Library of Congress.

Banting and Best won the Nobel Prize in 1923. By that year, insulin was being produced in massive quantities and saving thousands of lives. Today, largely due to modern dietary woes, more than 25 percent of Americans over the age of 65 have diabetes, according to the Centers for Disease Control, and if current trends continue within 30 years as many as one in three people in the U.S. may have the disease.

MORAL: Keep searching. There may be a Snowball’s chance.

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