Every few months some miracle drug or other is rolled out with bells and confetti, but only once or twice in a generation does the real thing come along.

These are the blockbuster medications that can virtually raise the dead, and while the debuts of some, like the AIDS drugs, are still fresh in memory, the birth of the first one is almost forgotten. It was injectable insulin, long sought by researchers all over the world and finally isolated in 1921 by a team of squabbling Canadians. With insulin, dying children laughed and played again, as parents wept and doctors spoke of biblical resurrections.

Visitors to a new exhibition opening Tuesday at the New-York Historical Society will find a story made particularly vivid by dramatic visuals, for insulin’s miracle was more than a matter of better blood tests. As in Ezekiel’s vision of the dry bones, it actually put flesh on living skeletons.

But the miracle went only so far: insulin was not a cure. In 1921, New York City’s death rate from diabetes was estimated to be the highest in the country, and today the health department lists diabetes among the city’s top five killers. Now though, it is adults who die, not children. What insulin did was turn a brief, deadly illness into a long, chronic struggle, and both the exhibit and the book, “Breakthrough,” by Thea Cooper and Arthur Ainsberg, on which it is based highlight the complicated questions that inevitably follow medical miracles: Who will get the drug first? Who will pay for it? Who will make enough for everyone? And, of course, who will reward its developers as they feel they deserve?