HISTORICAL ARTICLE

Reproduced from The Toronto Star newspaper, April 1993

Theodore Ryder: the last living link to the discovery of insulin

Michael Bliss, University of Toronto Historian and Special Correspondent to The Star

A chapter in Canadian medical history ended quietly last month in Connecticut. On March 8th 1993, Theodore Ryder died in his sleep from heart failure at age 76.

Ryder was an insulin-dependent dia- betic, but no ordinary insulin user. He had been taking insulin since July 15th 1922, longer than any person alive. he was given his first injections here in Toronto by Dr Frederick Banting, when Banting was in charge of trials of the great medical breakthrough he and his co-workers had just announced.

Ted Ryder was one of the first dozen humans to receive insulin, and the last of the original patients to die.

Ryder was born in New Jersey in 1916. At age four, he began to show the symp- toms of severe juvenile diabetes - ex- cessive urination, insatiable thirst and hunger, rapid weight loss.

The diagnosis was like a death sen- tence, for the only ‘treatment’ for diabetes was to force patients to eat sparingly. Their bodies had lost the ability to meta-

bolise food properly, so they should only eat the small quantities they could meta- bolise. At best, these ‘undernutrition’ diets allowed diabetics to prolong their life for a year or two while they slowly starved to death.

In the spring of 1922, Ryder’s family heard about the discovery of insulin at the University of Toronto by a team of re- searchers led by Banting and Professor JJR Macleod. A physician-uncle came to Toronto and pleaded with Banting to accept the child for treatment.

Insulin was in desperately short supply. Banting said to wait three months. “Doc- tor, he won’t be alive by then,” Ryder’s uncle said. Banting relented.

Ted Ryder was a five year old, 27- pound human skeleton when Banting began giving him insulin. Within a few months, he had come back to life and apparent good health, a beautiful ex- ample of what even medical personnel were calling the ‘miracles’ wrought by insulin.

Teddy Ryderas a child- ‘before’and ‘afier’insulin treatment

From theFGBantingPap, Ihoma~FisheTRa~BookLibrary, Unhriwrsityof Tmnto

In 1923, the Toronto researchers re- ceived a Nobel prize, Canada’s first, for the discovery of insulin. Banting and Macleod divided their prize money with the other members of their team, Charles Best and JB Collip.

The interplay between the researchers (they literally came to blows in the lab and squabbled for decades about credit for the discovery), was one of the main themes of my 1982 book, TheDiscoveryof Insulin. But I had also paid attention to the impact of insulin on diabetic patients and had heavily emphasised the near- resurrections that the team witnessed in the magical season of 1922.

I thought that the last of the patients had died, for even today the life span of insulin-using diabetics is well below normal. I had seen little Ted Ryder’s Toronto file, but didn’t have occasion to mention him in my book. In 1983, after giving a talk on the discovery of insulin to a medical history club at Yale, I was approached by a physician who told me of an old man in Hartford who claimed he first got insulin from Banting, name of Ryder . . . .

It turned out that Ted Ryder had had a long and satisfying life, faithfully using insulin and a healthy diet to control his diabetes. He had been a librarian and.a world traveller and had suffered none of the serious side-effects of diabetes that still plague many insulin-takers. When I met him in 1983, he was 67 and just settling in to a retirement home near Hartford.

One clue to his remarkable longevity lay in the fact that I also met his mother, age 92. The Ryders were what we used to call New England puritan stock.

The Star did a story about my re- discovery of Ted Ryder, and for the next decade he enjoyed a kind of celebrity status as the worlds senior insulin user. The American Diabetes Association gave him a special medal and made a colouring book about him, Teddy Ryder Rides Again. We had a memorable day at the US National Institutes of Health when Ted met the new generation of diabetes

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HISTORICAL ARTICLE Theodore Ryder: the last living link to the discove y of insulin

researchers, reminisced about his life, and gave autographs.

And it was truly memorable when he came to the University of Toronto in October 1990, for the unveiling of an historical display about the discovery of insulin. It featured his own ‘before” and ‘after’ pictures, and there he was in the flesh.

I last saw Ted when he and his girlfriend (he had been a bachelor all his life, a bit under his mother’s thumb, but had a wonderful late-life romance after she died) came to Toronto on that visit, and for a few months after that we would talk on the phone. It felt like I was literally calling up history.

Ted suffered congestive heart failure last summer [1992/31 and gradually wound down. He never lost his affection for the city where, as a child, he had been treated

Theodore Ryder as an old man by the Canadian doctors. In the last letter I got from Ted, he said he had been cheering for the Blue Jays in the World Series.

The last of the discoverers of insulin, Charles Best, died in 1978. Ted Ryder, the last patient, outlived all the physicians. We have lost our last living link with the great events of 1922 in Toronto. But the discovery itself lives on daily, in about 10 million diabetics around the world.

Acknowledgements This article is reprinted with permission from Michael Bliss and from The Toronto Star Syndicate, One Yonge Street, Toron- to, Ontario, Canada M5E 1E6.

Practical Diabetes International would like to thank Dr AM Laylee, Dorset, UK for bringing this news item to their attention and for supplying the pictures.

The Elizabeth Evans Hughes Insulin Medal The discovery of insulin by Banting and Best in 1922 led to a deluge of requests from patients and their doctors to come to Toronto to receive treatment. Most were to be disappointed due to the extremely limited supplies of insulin available at the time. However, one of the lucky ones was Elizabeth Evans Hughes, daughter of Charles Evans Hughes - an unsuccessful candidate in the USA presidential elect- ions of 1916, but who subsequently became Secretary of State and one of the most distinguished Chief Justices of the Supreme Court of the USA.

In August 1922, Elizabeth was clinging on to life and in a very emaciated state. On arrival in Toronto she became one of the first children to be treated with insulin. This treatment almost immediately trans- formed her existence. As she graphically described’it in her diaries “Oh, it is simply too wonderful for words, this stuff”.

Elizabeth Evans Hughes died in 1981 having married, raised a family and lived a full and active life. It is estimated that she had taked over 40,000 insulin injections during her life.

The Evans Hughes family has close connections with Wales. Charles Evans Hughes’ father emigrated to the USA in 1857 having been born in Tredegar. There are close connections with both North and South Wales and especially with the community founded by Howell Harris in Trefecca. Both father and son returned to Wales in the 1870s for a visit and Charles

subsequently revisited 14 years later as a fully qualified solicitor.

The Elizabeth Evans Hughes Insulin Medal is to commemorate the Welsh con- nection with the discovery of insulin, and in particular the transformation of Eliza- beth Evans Hughes from a skeleton-like waif weighing only 55 pounds to a ful- filled young woman who eventually received insulin therapy for nearly 60 years.

It is intended that this medal be pre- sented to all diabetics who have been treated with insulin for 50 years or more who either live in or have connections with Wales. If any patient/friend/family knows of individuals who may quallfy for this medal, please contact:

Dr Alan Rees BSC MD FRCP, Ward B7, University Hospital of Wales, Heath Park, CardaflCF4 4 X K LJK. Tel: +44 (011222 743000 Fax: +44 (0)1222 744581.

Front and back of the golden Elizabeth Evans Hughes Insulin Medal

188 Practical Diabetes International JuVAug 1995 Vol. 12 No. 4