Les débuts de l'insulinothérapie en France

The discovery of insulin by Frederick G. Banting and Charles H. Best propagated rapidly in North America during the years 1922-1923, but despite of the involvement of the Eli-Lilly pharmaceutical company the production of the hormone remained insufficient and its stability too problematic to allow the European supplying. Thanks to the information he obtained during a stay in the USA, Leon Blum, Professor of Medicine in Strasbourg (France), was probably the first in Europe who achieved the extraction of insulin with a process adapted from that of the Canadian physiologists. Between December 1922 and July 1923 he treated more than 50 diabetic patients and he published his therapeutic views in July 1923. In Paris, Henri Chabanier developed a simple method of preparation of alcoholic pancreatic extracts, but his ideas about the treatment of diabetes strongly differed from these of the American authors and his French colleagues. While in other European countries big pharmaceutical companies rapidly supplied the production of insulin, and insulin committees working in relation with the Toronto committee, were created in order to improve the purity and stability of the preparation, to standardize the titration, to reduce the production costs and to define the therapeutic positioning of insulin, France continued for several years a small-scale production and kept out of these evolutions.