Frederick Banting

Apart from being a renowned doctor, Frederick Banting was also an accomplished amateur painter and was often in touch with A.Y. Jackson and the Group of Seven.

He married twice in his lifetime. He first married Marion Robertson in 1924. The couple had a son, William in 1928 and eventually got divorced in 1932. He then married Henrietta Ball in 1937.

On 21 February 1941, he died from injuries sustained in an airplane crash in Musgrave Harbour Newfoundland. Although he survived the crash, he passed away the next day. He was en route to England on work. He was buried at Mount Pleasant Cemetery in Toronto.

Frederick Banting was born on 14 November 1891 in a farm house near Alliston, Ontario, Canada to Margaret Grant and William Thompson Banting. He was the youngest child of the family with four elder siblings.

He attended public and high schools in Alliston. In 1910, he joined Victoria College, University of Toronto, to study General Arts. His first year was unsuccessful and eventually in September 1912, he began medical school.

In 1914, he tried twice to join the army but was turned down due to his poor eyesight. The next year, however, he was successful; he spent the summer of 1915 attending military training before returning to medical school.

In December 1916, he graduated as a doctor and reported for military duty the very next day. He joined the Canadian Army Medical Corps and served in France during World War I.

In 1918, Frederick Banting was wounded at the Battle of Cambrai; yet he continued to serve at the battlefront. He was awarded the Military Cross for heroism under fire in 1919.

After the war ended in 1919, he returned to Canada and became a medical practitioner at London, Ontario for a short time. He studied orthopaedic medicine and in 1919–20, he became Resident Surgeon at the Hospital for Sick Children, Toronto.

He then moved to London, Ontario and from 1920-1921 he was a part-time teacher of orthopaedics at the University of Western Ontario besides being a general medical practitioner.

From 1921 to 1922, he was Lecturer in Pharmacology at the University of Toronto. In 1922, he received his M.D. degree, and was also awarded a gold medal.

By then, he had already become interested in diabetes through various journals and papers. Previous researches by Naunyn, Minkowski, Opie, and Schafer suggested that diabetes was caused from a deficiency of a protein hormone secreted in the pancreas. Schafer had named the hormone ‘insulin’.

Frederick Banting is best remembered as one of the discoverers of insulin. Later, he also became Canada’s first professor of medical research at the University of Toronto.

During the Second World War, he studied the causes of ‘blackout’ during flying and helped Wilbur Franks in his invention of the G-suit that helped pilots avoid blackouts when subjected to gravitational force. Around the same time, he was also involved in self experimentation of treating mustard gas burns.