It was suggested that such deaths were due to hypoglycaemia and related to the increasing use of human insulin. Eastwood, ‘Insulin and Independence’, British Medical Journal 293 (1986), pp.1659-61.The suggestion of an increase in the number of sudden deaths of young people with Type 1 diabetes in the UK has been investigated. Tattersall (a Professor of Clinical Diabetes) ends with the comment: ‘I did not know Jack Eastwood, but I had many extraordinarily resourceful patients like him from whom I learned as much as I did from my formal teachers’. Once or twice he wondered whether to switch from multiple injections of soluble insulin to something “more modern”, but decided there was no point in changing a system that worked so well.’ Before each meal he injected “the amount of insulin that I knew from experience would be needed to cope with the food about to be eaten, due allowance being made for what I expected to be doing during the next few hours.” In 1935 he visited a specialist for the last time and was told there was no need to go again, since he knew more about controlling his own diabetes than the specialist. and then had a normal four-course dinner in hall. He ate lunch in an ordinary restaurant, played golf nearly every afternoon. My diet was strictly controlled, especially on the carbohydrate side: for two years all my food was weighed and no excesses at all were allowed.” In 1931 he won a scholarship to New College, Oxford, and once there decided to use a less orthodox method of treatment.

I returned home to be looked after by my parents in accordance with the detailed instructions given to them. ‘In 1986 Jack Eastwood, a retired headmaster, wrote an article in the British Medical Journal remembering that when he developed diabetes at the age of 13 he was “taken to a Harley Street specialist and spent three weeks in a nursing home, during which time my diet and insulin requirements were settled. I don’t know whether any of you have read it, but Professor Robert Tattersall ends his Diabetes: The Biography (Oxford, 2009) with an upbeat story that’s worth repeating:

Diabetes by Robert Tattersall