Ancient History of Diabetes

The ancient history of diabetes is fascinating: Indians had a test for diabetes: see whether ants were attacted to the sufferer's urine; they called it "sweet urine disease". Interestingly, Japanese, Chinese, and Koreans terms for diabetes all mean "sweet urine disease". The Ancient Greeks and Egyptians had also noticed the sweet taste of urine in sufferers – but don't ask me how!

The word "diabetes" means "syphon" and refers to the sufferer's desire to wee a lot. The term first appeared in English in the early 1400s. To emphasise the sweetness, Thomas Willis referred to "diabetes mellitus", the "mellitus" meaning "honey", in 1675.

One hundred years later in 1776 Matthew Dobson was able to confirm that the sweetness was caused by too much sugar in the blood and urine of diabetes sufferers.

But what was causing this excess sugar? In 1889, Joseph von Mering and Oskar Minkowski discovered that if they removed a dog's pancreas then the dog would develop symptoms of diabetes. Then in 1910 Sir Edward Albert Sharpey-Schafer made the suggestion that diabetes sufferers were missing a chemical from their pancreas, and proposed calling this chemical "insulin", from "insula", Latin for "island", because of the Islets of Langerhans in the pancreas where this chemical is naturally made.

The next big step was taken in 1921 when Sir Frederick Grant Banting and Charles Herbert Best found they could reverse a dog's diabetes by giving it extracts from a healthy dog's pancreas. They went on to produce pure insulin from a cow pancreas, and in 1922 successfully treated human diabetes. Banting and the laboratory director MacLeod won the Nobel Prize for Physiology or Medicine in 1923, and they shared the prize money with the rest of the team, including Best and the chemist Collip.

Even more important, they released the patent to the public domain to allow unrestricted commercial production of insulin – and the use of insulin to treat diabetes spread around the world very quickly as a result.