In 1940, 19-year-old Eva Saxl fled Nazi-occupied Czechoslovakia with her husband, Victor.
They settled in Shanghai the same year Eva was diagnosed with type 1 diabetes.
She began insulin therapy after collapsing at the dinner table.
When insulin ran out
As Japanese occupation intensified, pharmacies closed and legal insulin supplies vanished.
After a friend died from contaminated black-market insulin, Eva refused that route. Instead, the couple found “Beckman’s Internal Medicine,” read how Banting and Best had extracted insulin, and decided to try.
Making insulin from scratch
Money and materials were scarce. Eva and Victor knitted stockings to fund water-buffalo pancreases, borrowed a small lab, and produced a brown insulin extract.
They tested it on rabbits, then accepting the risks of contamination and unknown potency, Eva tested it on herself. It worked.
A clinic for their community
Victor took the first vial to a nearby hospital and treated two diabetics who were close to death; both survived.
The Saxls then set up a clinic, rationing about 16 units per person per day – enough to keep roughly 400 people with diabetes in the Shanghai ghetto alive.
Rather than charge, they asked for donations to support the man who had lent them the lab.
Liberation and public advocacy
After American forces liberated their Jewish ghetto, the Saxls received clear insulin to distribute.
They later moved to New York, where their work drew national attention: President Eisenhower invited them to the White House, a Hollywood documentary told their story, and Eva became a spokeswoman for the American Diabetes Association – helping to challenge the stigma surrounding diabetes in the 1940s and 1950s.
Later years and legacy
After Victor died in 1968, Eva moved to Santiago, Chile to join her brother and worked to secure medicines for underprivileged children. She died in 2002.
