He started her insulin treatment immediately. The first injections cleared the sugar from
her urine, and by the end of the first week, she was up to 1,220 calories a day, still without sugar.
By the next, she was at 2,200 calories. Banting advised her to eat bread and potatoes, but she was
incredulous. It had been three and a half years since she had them. That fall, she was one of
several hundred North American diabetics pulled back from the edge. By November, she went
home to her parents in Washington, and by January, she weighed 105 pounds. The same year, the
31-year-old Banting won the Nobel Prize. Meanwhile, Dr. Allen, proprietor of an expensive
clinic whose patients no longer needed him, went broke. Insulin was a miracle drug, resurrecting
diabetics from comas and putting flesh on skeletons and, since it needed to be administered at
least twice daily, it was a miracle that would be performed over and over. The era of chronic
medical care had begun.
That may be the most poignant part of the history of Allen's clinic. The end of the famine
of Elizabeth Hughes is really the start of another hunger: for the drugs that will keep us well for
the rest of our lives. Elizabeth went to Barnard, reared three children, drank and smoked but kept
her diabetes a secret almost her entire life. She died of a heart attack in 1981, more than 43,000
injections of insulin later. But if the discovery of insulin took away the terror of diabetes, it
replaced the miraculous with the routine. Healing lost one major ingredient: awe. ''To think that
I'll be leading a normal, healthy existence is beyond all comprehension,'' Elizabeth wrote to her
mother, days after her first injection, in 1922. ''It is simply too wonderful for words.''