Category: Pharmaceutical Control

• The Insulin Control Theory

  The Insulin Control Theory held that the discovery of insulin in 1921 and its successful therapeutic use beginning in 1922 represented not only a medical breakthrough but the start of a new system of bodily regulation in which life itself would be made dependent on a mandatory administered substance. In this theory, insulin was interpreted less as a lifesaving treatment for diabetes than as a model for governing populations through continuous pharmaceutical dependence, dosing, supervision, and medical authority. Because insulin genuinely transformed diabetes from an immediate death sentence into a chronic managed condition requiring repeated injections, the theory attached itself to a real shift in the structure of survival. It became one of the earliest modern anxieties about medicine as a regime of lifelong compliance.