Aretaeus not only gave us our first correct description of diabetes, he also steered the origin of the name of the disease. “The fluid,” he wrote, “uses the patient’s body as a ladder to escape downward.” The Greek word for ladder is Diabaiton. Webster’s Unabridged Dictionary derives “diabetes” through the Latin from the Greek word that means “to stand with legs apart,” as in the position of a ladder. Though Aretaeus knew the signs and symptoms of diabetes, he recognized only the severer forms of the disease and accordingly thought of it a rare and fatal malady. In common with all different ancient writers, he had no plan of its cause or proper treatment. Fourteen centuries additional elapsed before the following step forward was created along the road to a real data of the nature of diabetes.

Whereas this step appears straightforward, it took a hardy scientist with a sturdy nature to form it, and its results were so much-reaching. For it absolutely was then that Thomas Willis, the foremost successful physician of the Restoration, described the sweet style of diabetic urine. First stimulated by the publication in 1552 of the Latin translation of Aretaeus’ work3 and currently greatly augmented by Thomas Willis, investigations of diabetes became a host in the ensuing years. Soon the adjective “mellitus” was added to the name. Derived from the Latin word mel, that means honey, it acknowledged the very fact that sweetness had one thing important to try and do with this strange disease. However still nobody had any inkling why. During the nineteenth century the incidence of diabetes seemed to increase over that of ancient times. A lot of and additional cases were observed and studied. The link to acidosis and the peculiar death in coma became fairly well known. However currently one thing happened that has occurred so often in the march of science. An epochal discovery was created quite by accident.

It had been Oskar Minkowski, born in Russia in 1858, who brought the story of diabetes into our own times (he died only twenty years ago). In 1889 Minkowski had an argument together with his associate, von Mering, and to settle it they removed the pancreas from a dog to work out if the animal could live without it. The dog died. Alternative dogs on whom Minkowski repeated the experiment also died. And what they died of was identical in each respect to human diabetes. Before dying the dogs passed excessive amounts of urine which contained from 5 to ten per cent sugar.four Now we were obtaining somewhere at last. Once three thousand years of observing that diabetics passed excessive amounts of urine—a reality which would logically have led to the belief that the disease had one thing to try and do with the kidneys—it absolutely was accidentally discovered that the cause must he in the pancreas.

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