The history of diabetes: The bitter sweet disease
The early history of diabetes and its treatment
Diabetes was first recorded in 1500 BC when Hindu healers noticed that flies and ants were attracted to the urine of people suffering intense thirst, huge outputs of urine, and a wasting of the body, rapidly followed by death.
The Greeks had a word for it. The Greek Aretaeus of Cappadocia named the disease diabetes. Diabetes comes from the Greek word meaning “siphon” or “to go through” and refers to a constant flow of water. This was an appropriate name because people with the disease take in huge amounts of water that seem to pass right through their bodies and out again in large amounts of urine. Aretaeus noted that patients “never stop making water and the flow is incessant like the opening of aqueducts.” The Greeks eventually added to the word diabetes the Latin word for honey, mellitus, to refer to the sweetness of the diabetic’s urine.
Bloodletting and opium were the main treatments used by the ancient healers. Without bloodletting and opium, the disease was invariably fatal. With bloodletting and opium, the disease was invariably fatal. In spite of the lack of efficacy of these treatments, bloodletting and opium continued to be used into the mid 1800s. That was because nobody had any idea what caused the symptoms of diabetes or how to prevent them.
The connection between diabetes and diet
The first link between diabetes and the diet was made by a man named John Rollo in the late 1790s. He noted the connection between eating carbohydrates and sugar in the urine. Eliminating carbohydrates from the diet, he observed, eliminated most of the sugar in the urine. These findings provided a scientific basis for diets high in fat and protein and low in carbohydrates.
In the late 1800s, an American doctor named Frederick Allen built upon John Rollo’s observations and prescribed a starvation diet for diabetics. Allen reasoned that since a diabetic’s body can not absorb all the food eaten, then limiting the amount of food eaten might prevent diabetic symptoms from occurring. Allen’s diet required living on 500 to 800 calories a day, eating mostly fats and proteins, and strictly avoiding nearly all sugars and starches. Lo and behold! It worked! Diabetics who went on Allen’s starvation diet no longer died of diabetes. They died of starvation.
However, the diet did keep some people alive for a few years longer than they otherwise might have lived.
Elisabeth Evans Hughes
In some diabetics the diet kept them alive long enough to begin insulin treatment when insulin was discovered in 1921. Elizabeth Evans Hughes, the daughter of New York Governor Charles Evans Hughes, was one of these people. She was diagnosed with diabetes in 1918. Dr. Allen’s starvation diet kept her alive until 1922 when she weighed 45 pounds. She became one of the first and the most famous of the patients to receive insulin. At that time, Dr. Frederick Banting, a co-discoverer of insulin, began treating her with twice-daily injections of insulin. Her recovery from near death was reported world wide and became an international event.
There is a picture of her in Dr. Banting’s scrap book. Opposite her picture are three notations giving her weight at three different times in her life: in 1918 when she was 11 years old, she weighed 75 pounds; on August 16, 1922, when she was 15 years old, she weighed 45 pounds; on January 1, 1923, four and a half months later, she weighed 105 pounds – she had gained 60 pounds in four and a half months. She lived to the age of 73.
This brings us to the discovery of insulin. The discovery of insulin will be the subject of next month’s article.
Mary Lou Williams, M. Ed., is a lecturer and writer in the field of nutrition. She welcomes inquiries. She can be reached at 267-6480.