Most medical people despised the press, holding attitudes not totally unfamiliar today. Reporters tended to be suckers for every quack, half-quack, over-eager scientist, or naive country doctor who thought he had a serum to cure tuberculosis, a herbal remedy for cancer, or a new surgical procedure to rejuvenate the aged.

When the newspapers were not wasting space on undeserving medical stories, they were over-playing legitimate news, getting their facts wrong, and generally making a nuisance of themselves interfering in the lives and practices of busy professionals.

Doctors’ deep suspicion of what they read in the newspapers and even in the less-carefully edited of the medical journals, helps to explain some of the early skepticism about insulin in countries like Britain: Oh, the Americans are always curing everything; this week it’s diabetes.

Even in Canada and the United States it was some months before there was enough confirmation of the unlikely news from Toronto to convince wire services and the more skeptical doctors and editors that insulin was, indeed, the real thing.