Sweet Talk: A Layman’s History of Diabetes

3,500 years with a disease that affects (along with its precursor)

more than one-third of Americans

CAROL ANN WILSON | November 14, 2018

If you don’t have “diabetes,” someone close to

you does. That’s “diabetes” in quotation marks

because that’s what we call it, but the disease

is part of a much bigger problem: metabolic

failure.

As of 2015 (the most recent year for data), 30.3

million Americans had diabetes—9.4 percent

of the U.S. population—according to the

Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

Another 84.1 million were prediabetic,

meaning that untreated they would likely have diabetes within five years. According to the

American Diabetes Association, the total economic cost of diabetes in the U.S. increased from

$205 billion in 2007 to $327 billion in 2017.

Those numbers have steadily increased. They have never declined. The most that physicians

even hope for is that their diabetic patients maintain their status or that they don’t get too

much worse.

There are two main forms of diabetes: Type 1, formerly called juvenile diabetes because it is a

kind of birth defect wherein the person’s pancreas produces no insulin or the person does not

even have a pancreas, and Type 2, formerly called adult-onset diabetes because it develops

later in life.

I have spent hundreds of hours researching diabetes—because I was diagnosed a diabetic at

68—and want to share a few things I have learned about the history of this awful disease, in

layman’s terms. Most diabetics and those who love them should find something of interest

here.

The Ancients

Around 600 BCE, a Hindu physician in India named Sushruta, a legendary scholar of Indian

medicine, wrote textbooks in Sanskrit that stand today among the most important ancient

medical treatises. His work was later translated to Arabic, Latin, English—well, most

languages, now—and serves as the foundational text of medical tradition in India. Sushruta is

often referred to as the founding father of surgery.

He described diabetes as a disease characterized by the passage of large amounts of urine,

sweet in taste. Sushruta said the disease affects primarily obese people who are sedentary, and

he emphasized the role physical activity could play in lessening its effects.

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He tested for the disease by observing whether ants were attracted to a person’s urine, and he

also called it “sweet urine disease.” Two types of diabetes were identified as separate

conditions for the first time by Sushruta, with the first type associated with youth and the

second with being overweight. Prescient!

In 250 BCE, Apollonius of Memphis (today Cairo) is credited with coining the term diabetes

from the Greek term meaning “to go through or siphon,” for a disease that drains patients of

more fluid than they can consume.

In the second century, Aretaeus the Cappadocian, a Greek physician who revived Hippocrates’

teachings and practiced in Rome and Alexandria, named the condition diabeinein for causing

the patient to pass too much water. After his death he was entirely forgotten until two of his

manuscripts were discovered sometime around 1550. More than any other physician of

antiquity, his name has been linked with diabetes. Blessed with a gift for words, he produced

the first clear written description of the disease. In the January-March 2012 edition of Hormones,

his description is called “outstandingly vivid and accurate.”

Note his description, from some 2,000 years ago:Diabetes is a remarkable affliction, not very frequent among men. […]

The course is the common one, namely, the kidneys and the bladder; for

the patients never stop making water, but the flow is incessant, as if from

the opening of aqueducts. […] The nature of the disease, then, is chronic,

and it takes a long period to form; but the patient is short-lived, if the

constitution of the disease be completely established; for the melting is

rapid, the death speedy. Moreover, life is disgusting and painful; thirst,

unquenchable; excessive drinking, which, however, is disproportionate

to the large quantity of urine, for more urine is passed; and one cannot

stop them either from drinking or making water. Or if for a time they

abstain from drinking, their mouth becomes parched and their body dry;

the viscera seems as if scorched up; they are affected with nausea,

restlessness, and a burning thirst; and at no distant term they expire.

They thirst, as if scorched up with fire. […] Hence, the disease appears to

me to have got the name diabetes as if from the Greek word [signifying a

siphon], because the fluid does not remain in the body, but uses the

man’s body as a ladder, whereby to leave it. They survive not for long,

for they pass urine with pain, and the emaciation is dreadful; nor does

any great portion of the drink get into the system, and many parts of the

flesh pass out along with the urine.

— The extant works of Aretaeus, the Cappadocian

by Francis Adams

The Sydenham Society, London

Toward the Modern Era

Going through history, we assume that medical practitioners followed the work of these

ancient heroes, but we still do not see much progress in treating the disease or even in making

diagnoses. Because the urine of people with diabetes was “sweet tasting,” for several centuries

the condition was often diagnosed by water tasters—people who drank the urine of those

suspected of having diabetes.

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Paracelsus, the father of toxicology

Paracelsus, credited as the father of

modern toxicology, identified

diabetes as a serious systemic

disease. Wikipedia Commons

Then in the 1500s we find Paracelsus, a Renaissance-era

Swiss contemporary of Copernicus, Leonardo da Vinci, and

Martin Luther. Paracelsus was a colorful character.

Credited as the father of toxicology, he believed strongly in

the diagnostic properties of urine, and he identified

diabetes as a serious systemic disease. Paracelsus was a

medical revolutionary who established the role of

chemistry in medicine. Carl Jung called him “not only a

pioneer in the domains of chemical medicine, but also in

those of an empirical psychological healing science.” A

famous Paracelsus quote urges keeping wounds clean: “If

you prevent infection, Nature will heal the wound all by

herself”—still excellent advice today.

In the next century, around 1675, Thomas Willis, personal

physician to England’s King Charles II, coined the term

diabetes mellitus, adding a Latin term meaning “sweetened

by honey.”

Another century passed, and in the very-important-to-us

year of 1776, Matthew Dobson, a Liverpool physician,

contributed to the fifth edition of Medical Observations and Inquiries (for a society of London

physicians) confirmation that the urine of diabetes patients was sweet to taste and after

evaporation contained a large amount of white, granular material that was indistinguishable

from sugar. Dobson also observed that the blood serum was sweet to taste, and thus he is

called the discoverer of hyperglycemia.

Dobson observed that, for some people, diabetes is fatal in less than five weeks and for others it

is a chronic condition. Apart from Sushruta’s important work, this appears to be the earliest

distinction between Type 1 and Type 2 diabetes. Dobson deduced that diabetic urine always

contains sugar that is not formed in the kidney but previously existed in the serum of the

blood. This simple observation, that diabetes is associated with a persistently raised blood sugar

concentration, pivoted diabetes research in the right direction, toward the mechanisms by

which the body deals with carbohydrates. For this, he deserves mention in our layman’s

history of diabetes.

In 1797, John Rollo, a surgeon in the British Royal Artillery, applied the first significant dietary

approach to the treatment of diabetes in his book An Account of Two Cases of the Diabetes Mellitus.

He successfully treated a patient using a high-fat and high-protein diet after observing that

sugar in the urine increased after eating starchy food.

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Diabetes Mellitus

Diabetes mellitus, the latin term meaning

"sweetened by honey", was coined by Thomas

Willis around 1675. Shutterstock

Rollo studied one Captain Meredith, 232 pounds,

who suffered from intense polyuria and

dehydration. Captain Meredith’s diet was adjusted

to one rich in protein and animal fat and low in

carbohydrates, in addition to medications. The

result was substantial weight loss, the elimination

of Meredith’s symptoms, and the reversal of both

his glycosuria and hyperglycemia. Rollo’s study

was a seminal point in unraveling ages-old

mysteries about diabetes.

Things get busier around 1857, when French

physiologist Claude Bernard reports his discovery

that glycogen is formed by the liver and speculates

that this is the same sugar found in the urine of

diabetics. His discovery resulted from his work on

the pancreas and was the first linking of diabetes

and glycogen metabolism.

In 1869, Paul Langerhans Jr., a German medical student, wrote in his thesis, “Contributions to

the Microscopic Anatomy of the Pancreas,” of his discovery of nine different cells in the

pancreas (which he dubbed the abdominal salivary gland) and his conclusion that the beta cells

help produce a hormone that would later be identified as insulin. Years later, these cells are

called the islets of Langerhans. Since 1978, the German Diabetes Association has awarded the

Paul Langerhans Medal to great achievements in diabetes research.

In 1889 in Alsace, France, Oskar Minkowski and Joseph von Mering surgically removed a dog’s

pancreas, inducing in the animal severe and eventually fatal diabetes.

Since 1966, the European Association for the Study of Diabetes has awarded the Minkowski

Prize for outstanding contributions to the advancement of knowledge in the field of diabetes

mellitus.

Toward Treatment

German physician Georg Ludwig Züelzer helped advance the treatment of diabetes when in

1903 he began experimenting with the pancreatic extracts of animals to inject into the bodies of

other hyperglycemia-induced animals. In 1908, he used the extractions of calf pancreases to

make a substance (“Acromatrol”) that he would inject into five diabetes patients. Although the

patients showed initial improvement, they died from the treatment’s side effects. While

Züelzer was not successful, his work helped lead to the identification of insulin.

Then in 1909, Belgian clinician and physiologist Jean de Meyer proposed the name insulin

(Latin for “insula” or “island”) for the internal secretion of the pancreas, but the substance

would not be isolated for several more years.

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In 1913, Harvard’s Frederick Madison Allen published the book Studies Concerning Glycosuria

and Diabetes, stimulating a revolution in diabetes therapy. He and another physician, Elliott P.

Joslin, became the foremost

American experts on the

disease. Joslin wrote The

Treatment of Diabetes

Mellitus, the first English

medical textbook on the

disease, and Diabetic

Manual—for the Doctor and

Patient, aimed at helping

patients cope with diabetes

—both classics. Joslin

believed diabetes to be “the

best of the chronic

diseases” because it was

“clean, seldom unsightly,

not contagious, often

painless, and susceptible to

treatment.” (We diabetics

question the “painless”

part.) Today the Joslin

Diabetes Center in Boston

is the world’s largest

diabetes research center and clinic.

Around the same time that Joslin and Allen published their first discourses on diabetes

treatments, the revelation of additional insights were delayed by global events. Between 1914

and 1916 a distinguished Romanian scientist and physiologist, Nicolae Paulescu, developed a

pancreatic extract which, when injected into a diabetic dog, had a normalizing effect on the

dog’s blood sugar levels. Paulescu’s work was interrupted by World War I, and it was 1922

before he published an article describing his successful isolation of “pancreine” or insulin. His

treatise, “Research on the Role of the Pancreas in Food Assimilation,” reports his 1916

discovery of the substance that normalized the blood sugar of a dog with diabetes. When

Frederick Banting and John James Richard Macleod were awarded the Nobel Prize in 1923 for

the discovery of insulin, Paulescu objected, claiming the discovery for himself. His claims were

rejected, but eventually Paulescu was recognized for his significance in the history of insulin.

Meanwhile, Allen worked on treatments for diabetics, promoting a strict dietary regimen that

was soon widely adopted. Allen limited his patients’ food quantities, believing the diabetic’s

body could not utilize food. His patients were admitted to the hospital and given only whiskey

mixed with black coffee (or clear soup for teetotalers) every two hours from 7 a.m. to 7 p.m.

The patients continued his “starvation diet” until there was no sign of sugar in the urine —

usually about five days. Unfortunately, the Type 1 patients commonly died during the

treatment (probably from starvation!). Outcomes were better for Type 2 diabetics, and the

young people who survived became the first insulin users.

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World Health Organization 2016

Global Report

In 1919, Allen and two other physicians published Total Dietary Regulation in the Treatment of

Diabetes, with exhaustive case records and observations of most of his 100 diabetes patients. He

went on to become the Director of Diabetes Research at the Rockefeller Institute.

A year later, Canadian physician Frederick Banting is believed to have conceived the idea of

insulin after reading Moses Barron’s “The Relation of the Islets of Langerhans to Diabetes with

Special Reference to Cases of Pancreatic Lithiasis” in the journal Surgery, Gynecology and

Obstetrics. With help of his student Charles Best, Canadian chemist James Collip, and Scottish

physiologist John Macleod, Banting continued

experimenting with various pancreatic extracts on dogs

whose pancreases had been removed.

Insulin was “discovered” in 1921 when a de-pancreatized

dog was successfully treated with it. In Toronto in 1922, one

of Collip’s insulin extracts was tested on a 14-year-old boy

named Leonard Thompson who had Type 1 diabetes. The

boy had been close to death before treatment, but he

bounced back to life with the insulin. The news of this first

medical success using insulin for treatment of a human

with diabetes rapidly spread, and Eli Lilly and the

University of Toronto began mass producing insulin in

North America. Leonard Thompson lived another 13 years,

dying of pneumonia at 27.

Another early diabetes treatment story had a happier

ending. On Aug. 16, 1922, Elizabeth Evans Hughes, the

13-year-old diabetic daughter of U.S. Secretary of State

Charles Evans Hughes, arrived in Toronto to be treated by

Dr. Banting. She weighed only 45 pounds and was barely

able to walk but responded immediately to the insulin treatment. Elizabeth went on to live a

productive life and in 1981 died of natural causes at age 73. Her life is chronicled in a 2010 book

by Thea Cooper and Arthur Ainsberg, Breakthrough: Elizabeth Hughes, the Discovery of Insulin,

and the Making of a Medical Miracle.

While insulin was shown to prevent early death from diabetic coma, insulin treatment did not,

and to this day does not, prevent the chronic, disabling, and sometimes deadly complications

of the disease, such as neuropathy (nerve damage), nephropathy (kidney damage), poor

wound healing, and retinopathy (retina damage). There is no substance nor has any drug yet

been developed that treats the root cause of diabetes, which is metabolic failure.

In his Nobel Prize lecture Banting said, “Insulin is not a cure for diabetes; it is a treatment. It

enables the diabetic to burn sufficient carbohydrates, so that proteins and fats may be added to

the diet in sufficient quantities to provide energy for the economic burdens of life.”.

In 1940, the American Diabetes Association was founded to address the increasing incidence of

diabetes and its complications. Today the Association comprises a network of more than 1

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1963: The first wearable insulin pump,

which delivers both insulin and glucagon,

is developed. At this point, the pump is

still a prototype—it's the size of a large

backpack. American Diabetes Association

million volunteers; a membership of 500,000 people with diabetes, their families, and

caregivers; a professional society of some 14,000 health care professionals; and a staff of 800.

In 2017, it reported revenue of $162 million. The Association’s founding and growth coincided

with a growing awareness—and incidence—of the disease.

In 1948, Joslin wrote about the “unknown diabetic” in Postgraduate Medicine. Although by that

time 1 million people were known to have diabetes, Joslin speculated that a million more had it

but did not know they did. He is the first prominent expert to emphasize that insulin alone

cannot solve all diabetes-related issues.

Products Developed for Diabetics

In the late 1940s, American chemist Helen Murray Free developed the “dip-and-read” urine

test (Clinistix) and other tablet-based tests for instant monitoring of blood glucose levels, in her

work at Miles Laboratories (now owned by Bayer AG). While retired from full-time work, Free

still serves as an adjunct professor of management at Indiana University, South Bend, and a

Bayer AG consultant. President Obama awarded her the National Medal of Technology and

Innovation in 2009.

The mid 1950s saw the introduction of oral drugs that helped lower blood glucose levels,

including sulfonylureas, oral medications that stimulate the pancreas to release more insulin.

In the 1960s, home testing strips for glucose levels in the urine increased the level of personal

control for people treating their diabetes. Ames (a division of Miles Labs) introduced the first

blood glucose meter in 1970, for use in doctors’ offices. Developed by Anton H. Clemens, it

weighed about 3 pounds and cost $650 (about $4,200 in today’s dollars). Insulin pumps and

laser therapy, used to help slow or prevent diabetic blindness, were also rolled out in the 1970s.

In 1973, U-100 insulin—which means there are 100

units of insulin per milliliter of fluid in a vial—was

introduced, helping correct dosing errors. And in 1976

the HbA1c test, measuring average blood sugar over

two to three months, came out and has become the

standard for screening for diabetes and measuring

longterm control. It’s generally the first thing doctors

today want to know when treating patients with

diabetic or prediabetic conditions: “What’s your A1c?”

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1964: The Ames Company introduces Dextrostix,

the first test strips that use a drop of blood to

measure glucose levels, providing real-time

information about blood glucose levels for

diabetics and prediabetics. American Diabetes

Association

In 1978, the federal government created the National Diabetes Information Clearinghouse to

gather and document all diabetes literature and disseminate it via the National Institute of

Diabetes and Digestive and Kidney Diseases, a part of the National Institutes of Health, which

is part of the Department of Health and Human Services.

Another turning point occurred in 1978 when the testing of the first recombinant DNA insulin

was announced. Until then, insulin manufacturers had to stockpile animal pancreatic tissue.

With this development, recombinant DNA technology (genetic recombination, such as

molecular cloning) allowed the manufacture of a genetically engineered “human” type of

insulin, and 1983 brought the first biosynthetic human insulin.

Reflolux, later known as AccuChek, was introduced in 1983. It allowed relatively easy and

accurate blood glucose self-monitoring and was followed in 1986 by the insulin pen delivery

system. In 1995, the drug metformin became

available in the U.S. Metformin is a biguanide that

prevents glucose production in the liver. The drug

remains in wide use today. And in 1996, the Food

and Drug Administration approved the first

recombinant DNA human insulin analogue, lispro

(Humalog).

Root Cause and My Story

Without exception, all the organizations and

associations aimed at curbing diabetes or helping

people live with it advocate lifestyle changes and

prevention as the only way to reduce the burden

caused by the disease. They urge early diagnosis,

along with changes in diet and exercise.

It sounds like these experts think that we have

done this to ourselves. But are we the ones who

have for decades crammed high-fructose corn

syrup and other sweeteners into just about every

product on grocers’ shelves. Are we the ones who

have caused the medical community to treat

symptoms instead of the diabetes’ root cause? Did we cause the marketing frenzy of

pharmaceutical ads or the large business of treating the disease?

I don’t think so, and I think that no medical school provides proper education on natural

substances for keeping us healthy. Thankfully, an increasing number of physicians are now

helping us educate ourselves and take control of our health.

I can personally advocate for one company with a physiologic insulin delivery treatment that

concentrates on the root cause, which is metabolic failure. We learned that the pancreas and

liver must be retrained to communicate with each other just as God’s design intended. Diabetes

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Carol Ann Wilson

Relief, which patented treatment for improvement in impaired hepatic glucose processing,

took a long-known idea and refined it for lasting results. As a co-inventor of the patent granted

in May 2017, my heart expands as I see hope restored for other diabetics suffering from the

many complications of this awful disease. My journey through the history of diabetes changed

my life and is now helping others to change theirs.

Nov. 14 is World Diabetes Day.

_______________________________________________________

Carol is a self-employed writer and researcher who lives in Houston.

Her background is legal, and she holds several certifications. She

currently serves as executive secretary for Diabetes Relief LLC, where

she is responsible for written communications and assists legal counsel.

She is the author of Plain Language Pleadings, has co-authored other

works, has 25 years as a newsletter editor, and is a longtime member of

Plain Language Association International. Visit her website

(carolannwilson.net) or send her an email (carolwilson@earthlink.net).

Gulf Coast Mensa | Joined 2000

REPRINTED WITH PERMISSION FROM Mensa Bulletin, November/December 2018;

www.us.mensa.org/read/bulletin/features/sweet-talk-a-laymans-history-of-diabetes

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