Here is the self-portrait of a man who struggled to merit his fame. Sakel never forgot that his adventures with insulin started in the service of an unprovable, vague theory. Having suddenly become a kind of hero of a section of the psychiatric world, he witnessed two decades of psychiatry degraded in his name under the title 'the new physiologic science of insanity'. Thirty years later, loaded with obsolete honors, he admits (p. 299) that his theory is not worthy of its fame. He pleads for the retention of his technique on the ground of