* Small bribes appear to have been necessary to forestall customs’ inquiries about the strange substances.²⁶

* Some of the concrete offers are cited in the endnote, but one bizarre encounter, described by Banting in his 1940 account, deserves special mention:

I was sitting in my room one evening. It was raining hard. I was called to the phone and a man asked if he could see me. He said he would come up immediately. Λ few minutes later he arrived. He was a big man and there seemed hardly room for him. He looked about and his first words were, “Well for God’s sake”.

I sat at my desk and he sat on the only other chair, which was of the hard stiff back kitchen variety. “So this is where you live.” “Well you are a damned fool.” “Now listen to me” and he proceeded to tell me how the wife of a friend of his had been under the care of the best Doctors in New York and despite the diet treatment she got worse and worse. She had been given insulin and she felt entirely different. He knew the woman. She had tried everything and “knew them all”, you could not fool her. She was all for insulin. That was good enough for him. All I had to do was to hand over the patents to a group on Wall Street and he would guarantee me $1,000,000 cash. Insulin would be patented in every country in the world. Ten percent royalty would be collected. The company would keep five & I would be given 5% royalty in addition to the $1,000,000 cash. A chain of clinics would be established across the United States and Canada one or two in every large City. I would be Medical Director and would have all the clinical cases for study and could have all the laboratories I desired. I would thus be relieved of financial responsibilities, being independently wealthy, and could devote myself to scientific research. I need not even see patients if I did not wish – “except a few very wealthy ones by appointment”. My time would for the most part be my own. They would look after the whole organization.

To me as I sat in my little room filled with smoke, it was not even a temptation. It meant that the suffering diabetic would be exploited.

When he had finished I only asked him one question. “What would you do for the poor diabetic who could not pay?” He replied, “that can be easily worked out, they can be treated in an out patient clinic”. “Not good enough”, I replied. “I am afraid you do not understand the situation. The indigent diabetic is our greatest problem. Every effort must be made to reduce the cost of insulin and remove the necessity of expensive diets so that they can look after themselves.”

He said that there was one more thing that he would like to point out. “If such a scheme as I have outlined is not followed, then you will have every doctor in the USA making money out of the diabetics, and they will form clinics and make the money out of diabetes that you should be making.”

“I am afraid this scheme is not very attractive to me.” He then gave me proof of his financial backing. He gave me his card and asked me to think it over and get in touch with him. He phoned long distance from New York a couple of nights later. He could not understand why I still declined.

This incident took place in the summer of 1922, probably late in August. It is impossible to know how accurately Banting remembered the encounter and whether the American visitor was a reputable businessman or a fly-by-night promoter. I suspect the latter. Nonetheless, the incident was important in reinforcing Banting’s belief that he had turned down incredible fortunes to keep insulin in Canada.

* Banting also collected fees from his private patients, but these appear to have been very modest, much less than fashionable physicians traditionally charged those who could afford to pay.