Who was Patient JL? Can we Talk about who He Wasn’t?

If you’ve been around T1D long enough, or done much research on it, you’ve probably seen this image before. Most likely, you have seen it somewhere and it says it’s a picture of Leonard Thompson, the first person to get an insulin injection. It’s on diabetes websites and diabetes blogs. Over and over the image is associated with Leonard Thompson. In fact, if you Google his name, more images of this little boy will come up than the actual Leonard Thompson. Despite what you’ve seen and been told, Thompson is not the person in these pictures.

Photo: Eli Lilly and Company archives

While doing some research

I was writing an article about the first successful insulin dose, and I needed some images of Leonard Thompson to add to the article. I’ve always associated these images with Leonard Thompson, so it was no surprise that they were some of the first to pop up on my search.

But, they were images from other websites and blogs. I wanted to find the original image, to give credit to the original owner.

After not much digging, I found the images from Eli Lilly and Company. But, this wasn’t Leonard Thompson.

Patient JL

Of course, the first glaring problem was that the patient is named “patient JL”. Somehow, I doubt JL is short for Leonard Thompson.

Secondly, the dates don’t work for Thompson. He started insulin therapy in January 1922 and was released from the hospital that May. It’s impossible that he would look skeletal by December of that year, as the image indicates. He had already been on insulin for almost a year at that time.

Then, the image itself. Thompson was 14 when he started insulin. Now yes, he had been wasting away on a starvation diet, but does the child in either of those images look like a teenager to you? No, I don’t think so.

Looking closer, the image even says what patient JL weighed before and after his insulin treatment. 15 and 29 pounds respectively. It is very well documented that Thompson weighed 65 pounds prior to his first insulin treatment. You can even see this in his original patient records, written by Dr. Banting.

So, who is patient JL then?

He’s obviously not Leonard Thompson, but who was he?

Frankly, it’s hard to figure out. The fact that the Eli Lilly images only have “patient JL” in the description strongly implies that they didn’t want his identity to be known.

In my digging, the most I could find was that patient JL was 3 years old in those pictures. I still have no idea who he was. And maybe that’s the way it should be.

It’s understandable why the images, over time, have become linked to Leonard Thompson

There are no known “before” pictures of Thompson. The skeletal frame of patient JL has a shock value that people want to use to explain how important insulin is.

Since the story of patient JL is unknown, using the images with Thompson’s story has a bigger impact.

It’s understandable how it happened.

But, someone made an assumption and then everyone took it and ran with it. There are big diabetes websites that have images of patient JL with all of Leonard Thompson’s information attached to it (name, date of birth, birthplace etc).

And it gets shared because it has a big impact.

But, I assure you, that is not Leonard Thompson.

~ Leah

Where did you first see this image? Did you think it was Leonard Thompson? Ever wonder what else has been muddled in the history of T1D? Let’s chat about it in the comments!

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