Kat MacDonald

Banting House

 

Hi, my name is Kat MacDonald. I’m a public historian and budding heritage professional. I’m a type one diabetic and have been for a couple of years, and I had the honor to work at Banting House as an intern and continue to be involved with Banting House on their advisory committee…

It was when I was driving up to move into my apartment in London that we passed the Flame of Hope. And I said, “What’s that?” And I quickly like pull out my phone, I start Googling, and I’m like, “Oh my goodness, I never knew this existed.” I have had diabetes for a couple of years now, and I never knew this. And then I was so excited when we were told that one of the projects we’d be working on is with Banting House and that we would get to go visit it.

And I remember very fondly when I went into the bedroom, very similar to experiences many people with diabetes, is, is that overwhelming sense of like, I don’t know, it’s almost sublime in nature because you’re so grateful and thankful that this medication exists, that this life-saving medicine exists, and you’re sitting in the very place that it was dreamt of, you know, thought of. And it’s almost hard to put into words what that feeling is for somebody with diabetes.

One of the biggest projects I did was actually working with the Dear Dr. Banting Letters to make a digital exhibit. You know, the understanding that COVID really highlighted to a lot of us working in museums, the need to ensure that museums are accessible to even the person the furthest away. And because there’s diabetics everywhere in the world, and it is, especially in COVID times, but even more so now with the cost of living, it’s hard to make that kind of pilgrimage to London.

And my choice was to always work with the Dear Dr. Banting Letters as a type 1 diabetic, that’s the one kind of like, archival-like material that I really wanted to work with. And it made you feel so, as a kind of a researcher, it made me feel so not alone in a time where we were so isolated and alone. That I was connecting with people across the world through various different points of time.

And so that’s why I also decided to write the very first part of this kind of exhibit is my own letter to Dr. Banting and talking about the importance and the almost the honor of being a type 1 diabetic and getting to work at this heritage site and also to communicate this heritage and history to kind of, I guess, the world.

There is something very special about getting the chance to work at a place that you’re so deeply connected with.