Teddy Ryder. Banting's living miracle
U.S. man, 67 was near death at the age of 6 but insulin was discovered in the nick of time
By Frank Jones Toronto Star
HARTFORD, Conn. — A 67-year-old bachelor living quietly in an apartment here is a chapter of Canadian medical history.
Teddy Ryder, by all odds, should have died years ago. He was one of the first diabetics to be treated by Dr. Fred Banting in the heady months following the dramatic discovery of insulin in 1922.
His mother brought 6-year-old Teddy, a walking skeleton, to Toronto when he had only weeks to live. Three months later he went home, able to run and play, his cheeks filled out, a child as if resurrected from the grave.
Even so, the odds against him living this long were great — especially because insulin doses in the early days were wildly erratic in quality and quantity.
Yet Toronto historian Michael Bliss, author of The Discovery of Insulin, and 1 sat enthralled, listening not only to Teddy's story, but that of his mother, who is very much alive and alert at the age of 92.
Mother's determination
Theirs is an amazing story of a moil er's determination that her son won not die, and along the way it provic some surprising insights into the persn-ality of Canada's most famous doctor. Fred Banting.
Teddy's existence came to light when, two physicians approached Bliss, a University of Toronto history professor, three weeks after he had given a lecture on insulin to the Beaumont Medical History Club at Yale University.
"I have a patient who has been using insulin for more than 60 years," one of them said. "His name is Teddy Ryder."
Bliss couldn't believe it. In his files were copies of letters written between Banting, the co-discoverer of insulin, and the Ryder family, and there was even a childish note to Banting from Teddy after he went home.
It said: "Dear Dr. Banting, I wish you could come to see me. I am a fat boy now and I feel fine. I can climb a tree. Margaret (his sister) would like to see you. Lots of love from Teddy Ryder."
But Elizabeth- Hughes, daughter of Charles Evans Hughes, the one-time U.S. secretary of state, who herself received insulin from Banting later that summer, had told Bliss shortly before she died in 1981 that Teddy Ryder had died long since.
When Bliss and I came to Hartford to meet the remarkable mother and son, we were met at the airport by one of the physicians who had approached him at Yale, Dr. LeRoy H. Wardner. An elderly man, Wardner told us as we drove through snowy Connecticut scenery that he had attended Teddy's mother, Mildred Ryder, for 35 years.
First stop was the Brightview Retirement Home where, after a while, Wardner emerged with a delicate, upright lady who Inched gingerly across the snow. Mildred Ryder looks frail at the age of 92, but her mind is sharp, her manner gracious.
Never married
"I've so looked forward to this," she said when settled in the back of Ward-ner's Jeep Wagweer. With Bliss now writing a biography of "Banting and also planning an item about Teddy in the next edition of The Discovery of Insulin, she felt happy, she said, that Teddy would finally get his footnote in medical history.
Teddy, she said as we drove to his apartment, had never married, but had
been particularly opposed to one liaison because the girl was a Christian Scientist and might have persuaded him to stop using insulin. Mrs. Ryder still phones her son twice a day to make sure he's well and has taken his daily shot of insulin.
As we helped Mrs. Ryder up the path, Teddy, a chubby, shy man, emerged wearing a shirt and tartan pants. "Now wouldn't you think he would put a sweater on," she said. "Now that's the mother in me," she laughed. "But then if he didn't have a mother he wouldn't be alive, would he!"
While Teddy served coffee his mother settled herself in an armchair, her hands resting on a box from which, as she told her story,.she produced photographs of Teddy at various stages of his treatment.
and two of the original insulin vials from Connaught Laboratories dating from 1922.
The happiness of Mrs. Ryder and her husband Earle, an engineer, had been complete, she said, with the birth of a baby girl, Margaret, following that of Teddy. "We were in love from the time we were 15 until my husband died when he was 89," she said.
But around the age of 4, Teddy began showing disturbing symptoms. "He was growing tall, but he wasn't putting on any weight. And he couldn't get enough to eat," said Mrs. Ryder.
A doctor in New Jersey, where they were living, took Teddy on his knee, felt his thin arms, and told her he was diabetic. "I was so ignorant, I thought that was something to do with the kidneys. I didn't realize it was that serious," she said.
Earle's brother. Dr. Morton Ryder, was interning in a New York hospital, and hurried out that night to their home in Keyport, N.J.-He left them with no illusions: Within a few weeks or months Teddy would be dead.
Mrs. Ryder took the skinny little boy from doctor to doctor, looking for help. One doctor told her bluntly that if it was his child he would let him eat as much as he liked, even though that would mean shortening his life.
The only man who offered any hope was Dr. Frederick Alien, a gruff, forbidding researcher who had discovered he could extend the life of diabetics by starving them almost to death. Many doctors deplored Alien's ruthless methods, but Mildred and Earle decided to take Teddy to stay at Alien's Psychiatric Institute in Morristown, N.J.
"He had no bedside manner to speak of," Mrs. Ryder said, "but he was very kind to us. When he heard I had a baby he insisted I could bring her along too so that she wouldn't have to be weaned."
Teddy's memories of that period are not the happiest. He recalls the broad lawns and handsome mansion that housed the institution, but when he was given his first breakfast of oatmeal he said, "Mama, they don't know how to feed little boys here."
• From the time he arrived there in September, 1920, his calorie intake was
.steadily reduced until, at some stages, he was only getting 224 calories a day (compared with a normal child's intake of perhaps 1,500). "They told us flatly he, could only live two years or maybe not that long," Mrs. Ryder said. "He was failing all the time."
Existing on a diet of jellies, thrice-cooked cabbage, and washed bran cookies, Teddy began a scrapbook in which, he recalls, he stuck pictures of food he had cut out of magazines.
But Dr. Alien was unrelenting: "The less food, the more life," he said. By the end of 1921 Teddy was a walking skeleton weighing only 27 pounds. At home, "you had to hear the comments the neighbors made," Mrs. Ryder said. " 'How does she expect that child to get better when she's starving him to death,' they would say."_______
No Christmas tree
They didn't buy a Christmas tree that year, Mrs. Ryder said, because they thought Teddy might not last until Christmas Day.
Teddy's uncle, Dr. Morton Ryder, had been searching high and low for an answer while the life of his first and favorite nephew drained away. In February, 1922, there was a break. Roy Greenaway, a Toronto Star reporter, scored a world exclusive by revealing details of Banting's and Charles Best's experiments with insulin.
Dr. Ryder got in touch with Banting, who was being bombarded with queries from, diabetics all over the continent. Banting was treating seven patients but then, unaccountably, they lost the knack of making insulin. It wasn't until May 22 they were in production again.
In June Dr. Ryder came to Toronto to try to get Banting to take Teddy as a pa-
tient. "Bring him to me in September," Banting said. "He won't be alive by then," Ryder said.
On his return to New York, Ryder sent Banting a full history of Teddy's case. "He walks about the house, though to look at his legs you would suppose him unable even to stand," he wrote. "For months he has not had the energy to play by himself. ... It looks to me as though a very few more months on the starvation diet will be all he can hold out. ... I need not tell you how earnestly I hope you will see your way clear to treat
UJhen Mrs. Ryder left New York with Teddy for Toronto early in July the boy weighed 22 pounds. "I felt so sorry for Mildred," said a friend who had seen them at the station, "because she will never bring that child back alive."
They arrived in Toronto on the sleeper on a Saturday morning that hot July, and drove straight to Banting's home at 160 Bloor St. W. "But there was no insulin — the last bunch had gone bad," Mrs. Ryder said. "We had to wait until Mon-
She liked Banting at first sight. "He was not awesome at all. That Sunday he took delivery of the first new car he had ever owned and he came around and took us for a drive in it."
Banting sent Mrs. Ryder and Teddy first to Toronto General Hospital to stay, but finding she could not arrange for Teddy's spartan diet there, she found them a room on Grenville St. not far from Queen's Park, where she could prepare his meagre meals herself.
"I had to carry him upstairs to the bathroom, but he didn't weigh much," she said.
Starting on the,Monday, Banting would bring over the insulin and give Teddy his injections. "Sometimes he had
to have three or four injections a day. Nothing was standardized at all," Mrs. Ryder said. "Dr. Banting would say, •Well, we tried this on a rabbit and we'd better go easy on this lot. It may be too strong.' But if there was any little sign of Teddy having a reaction, he would come running."
to. The few patients Banting agreed to treat were arriving like walking skeletons then magicaHy filling out as the insulin allowed them to start eating
The city became the Mecca for well-to-do families seeking help for their stricken children. Earle Ryder, on a visit in September, met Charles Hughes, the secretary of state, and found him aloof. The wealthy Baltimore parents of Ruth Whitehill, another of Banting's small patients, brought their butler and maids and rented an eight-room apartment. The Ryders were often invited over, and on Sept. 14 the Whitehills gave a birthday party for Teddy.
"I wore an Indian suit and I think even the help was in costume," Teddy recalled. "Then the doorbell rang. I opened it and there was a tall lady in a rose gown and a large hat and wearing white gloves.
"I couldn't figure — she looked somehow familiar. Then I realized — it was Dr. Banting dressed up!"
Drives in country
Teddy remembered drives in the country around Toronto — "When we stopped at a soda fountain I was only allowed Vichy water" — and especially loved the Japanese armor on the trips they made to the Royal Ontario Museum.
Some nights, Mrs. Ryder said, after she'd put Teddy to bed in their single room and was sitting reading by the green-shaded light she used so as not to wake him. Banting would drop by for a talk. "He would tell me about his troubles with a particular young lady. He'd asked her a dozen times to marry him in the past and he'd always been refused. Now she wanted to come back and he didn't know what to do." (Finally Banting rejected the woman, Edith Roach, and married someone else.)
Banting, she said, would also go on at length about Prof. J. J. R. Macleod, who had reluctantly given Banting laboratory space, but who now seemed determined, in Banting's view, to take credit for the discovery.
On one occasion, Mrs. Ryder said, Banting took her and Teddy to show them the laboratory in the Medical Building where he and Best had slept with their dogs and cooked their food on a Bunsen burner while they experimented.
Mrs. Ryder can remember no dramatic moment when she realized Teddy was going to live, but he was filling out steadily.
By the time Mildred returned to New Jersey with Teddy at the beginning of October, 1922, the change in the little boy was dramatic. "I can't tell you too strongly how much pleased I am with what you have accomplished," Morton Ryder wrote to Banting.
When Banting addressed a packed hafl of medical men in New Jersey in January, 1923, he had Teddy, now a chubby little boy, come up and sit on his knee
In 1929, the Ryders were in Toronto again when Teddy's grandfather, who had paid much of the cost of his treatment, attended a bankers' conference at the Royal York Hotel. They went to see Dr. Banting, took what was probably the earliest movie of him working in his laboratory, and invited him to a banquet.
Teddy, who later graduated from Cornell University, and did a variety of jobs, including library work, before he retired, lives alone with his cat, Irene.
'Never gave up'
"I think Mama deserves extraordinary credit," he said. "She never gave up. She never despaired of my living. Even hearing people say what a miserable-looking thing I was, she figured the doctors knew best. She never paid any attention to con-, ventional wisdom."
"Well, we were lucky," Mrs. Ryder said, gathering her souvenirs together. "We had Uncle Morton to back us up. I look on it as Dr. Banting's miracle. We have lived through remarkable times.
"And you know," she added, "I have never heard Ted say, 'Why did this happen to me?' He has never resented having to take insulin. I am proud of that fact."
She insisted he put his sweater on to come out to see us off. At the retirement home she took us all in to see her family photographs in her room. "You don't know what this day has meant to me," she said as we left.
As we walked down the corridor her physician. Dr. Wardner, said, "You know what she said when she knew you were coming here today. She said: 'This will make my life complete.' "
Teddy Ryder: A bachelor who lives in Hartford, Conn., he was a walking skeleton when brought to Dr. Frederick Banting in Toronto in 1922. But, as he said in a letter after his return home, he soon gained weight and by the age of 9, was a happy, healthy youngster.