The History of Diabetes

Diabetes has been recognized for nearly two thousand years now as a deadly disease. Aretaeus of Cappadocia is believed to be the first physician to complete a clinical description of diabetes around the first century CE. He attempted to treat the condition with no luck. It was clear that it was incurable and a quick death in those days. The terms used by Aretaeus about diabetes are that “life is short, disgusting and painful”.

Diabetes is the shorten term of diabetes mellitus, diabetes is a Greek word meaning “siphon” or the passing through and mellitus is the Lain word meaning “honey or sweet”. is the first described Egyptian manuscript, 1500 BC, and was called “too great emptying of the urine”. In the 17^th century it was called “pissing evil” and in the ancient and medieval times diabetes was a deadly disease.

1776, Matthew Dobson studied the sweet taste of urine in the diabetics was caused by a lot of sugar in the blood and urine. Some of the forms of therapy to get rid of, or relieve the symptoms, diabetes were overfeeding to make up for the loss of fluids, wine and starvation. In 1889, Joseph von Mering and Oshar Minkowski discovered the role of the pancreas by animal studies, using dogs.

But it wasn’t until 1910 that Sir Edward Albert was caused by lack of insulin. Sir Frederick Grant Brating, in 1921, repeated what von Mering and Minkowski had done. He found out that if he took an extra from the pancreatic islets of a healthy dog and injected it into the unhealthy dog, the unhealthy dog symptoms reversed.

The next following year in January, 1922, a four- teen year old charity patient at Tronto General Hospital, Leonor Thompson, was the first person treated by injection of insulin. This insulin was purified insulin that had been extracted from a bovine pancreas. He lived for another thirteen years, passing away at age twenty- seven of pneumonia. Four- teen years later from when he got treated, in 1936, Sir Harold Percual published a piece of work he had done that separated type 1 and type 2 diabetes. Though, there are also claims that in 400-500 CE two Indian physicians Sushruta and Charaka associated that there were two forms of sickness. One sickness was associated with youth, while the other was associated with being overweight.

But it wasn’t until 1982 the first biosynthetic human insulin mass production approved on the market for several countries. Genetically altered bacteria had the insulin isolated out of it. The bacteria contained the human gene and this allowed for large quantities of the synthetic insulin to be produced.

In 2006 the drug company Pfizer released a new form of insulin that was inhalable. It consisted of a powdered form of human insulin. It was delivered to the lungs by means of an inhaler and there it was absorbed. It took a few hours to be absorbed into the body, so therefore it was only a treatment for type 2 diabetics. In 2007 this form of insulin was pulled off the market due to it’s poor sales.