The hormone insulin itself was not discovered in 1910; it was named then. In 1910, the British physiologist Sir Edward Albert Sharpey-Schafer (often written Sharpey-Shafer) proposed that diabetes was caused by the lack of a single chemical produced by the pancreas and suggested the name “insulin” for this substance, from the Latin “insula” meaning “island,” referring to the islets of Langerhans in the pancreas.

The actual discovery and successful extraction of insulin as a treatment for diabetes came later, in 1921–1922, by Frederick Banting, Charles Best, John Macleod and James Collip at the University of Toronto.