In an essay he wrote in 2004, Professor Bliss said his shift to medical history had been due in part to his family — his father was a small-town doctor on the shore of Lake Erie in southwestern Ontario — as well as “a kind of midlife change of pace.”

He chose the development of insulin as a subject partly because earlier accounts, he found, were inadequate. He was also inspired, he said, by his reading on Arctic exploration.

That “raised for me a methodological interest in the possibility of very detailed, day-to-day recreation of past discrete events,” he wrote, adding, “If you could virtually retrace the footsteps of Arctic explorers could you virtually redo the insulin experiments?”

John William Michael Bliss was born in Leamington, Ontario, on Jan. 18, 1941, to Dr. Quartus Bliss and the former Anne Crowe. He grew up in Kingsville, a farming and fishing town just to the west. In early childhood, Michael, as he was known, would join his father when he was called out to perform his duties as the local coroner. For a while, he considered following his father into medicine.

But that thought was dispelled one weekend when the police came by their house with a drunk who been in a brawl and needed stitches. The man was ushered into his father’s home office.

“As I sat and watched on that Sunday afternoon in his consulting room,” Professor Bliss wrote, “with blood and alcohol fumes everywhere, reflecting on my own complete disinterest in and lack of all manual skills, I decided that this was not what I wanted to do in life.”

He met his future wife, Elizabeth Haslam, at a high school dance in Harrow, Ontario, another farm town. They married in 1963, and both studied at the University of Toronto. Mrs. Bliss, a retired teacher, survives him. Besides their daughter Sally, he is also survived by two other children, Jamie and Laura Bliss; a brother, Robert, and four grandchildren.