Spectator contributors were asked: Which moment from history seems most significant or interesting? Here is Justin Webb’s answer:
A gloomy January day in the Canadian city of Toronto. The year is 1922 and a 14-year-old boy called Leonard Thompson is lying in the hospital. Leonard weighs under five stone. He has been on a starvation diet to try to keep his death at bay but he is close now to the end. Every Type 1 diabetic in human history has so far faced the same death; with no working pancreas they faded away, their bodies unable to cope with the processing of food.
But on 11 January of that year Leonard was selected for a lone experiment. He was injected with ‘a murky, light-brown liquid containing much sediment, which dissolved to a considerable extent on being warmed’.
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