Medical Guides

Diabetes as a disease is known for last thousands of years, but its cause was not clear. Earliest mention of diabetes is in an Egyptian medical text written around 1550 B.C., called the Ebers Papyrus. It describes a condition of ‘passing too much urine’.

The Greek physician Aretaeus, who lived in the second century A.D. gave diabetes its name, for a Greek word meaning `siphon’ or ‘pass through’. By the eighteenth century, the Latin term mellitus was added to diabetes. Mellitus means sugary taste.

In 1889, two German physiologists found that the pancreas was involved in diabetes. They discovered that a dog had developed diabetes when its pancreas was removed. This led the scientists to suspect that some substance in the pancreas prevented diabetes.

In 1921, a young surgeon, Dr Frederick Banting, made a breakthrough. He had the idea to isolate the groups of cells, called the islets of Langerhans, in the pancreas. A young medical student named Charles Best joined Banting in the research work.

Banting and Best succeeded in treating a dog with diabetes using extract from the islet cells. Within 6 months, the two scientists injected a pancreatic extract into Leonard Thompson, a 14-year-old boy who was suffering from diabetes, but the boy did not improve.

A biochemist J.B. Collip, purified the extract, and the experiment was repeated 12 days later. This time the boy Thompson, started improving and lived for 15years with regular insulin injections. In 1923, Banting along with another colleague was awarded the Nobel prize in Medicine for his discovery of Insulin.