Читать книгу Unveiling Diabetes - Historical Milestones in Diabetology - Группа авторов - Страница 10

The onset of disproportionate urination has been known since the mists of time, as was the notion that urine emitted in large quantity was often sweet and had the property of attracting bees, flies and other arthropods, or even vertebrates. Mention of diabetes is made in ancient medical textbooks from China, India, and Egypt. In Roman times, Aulus Cornelius Celsus and Rufus of Ephesus commented on polyuria, polydipsia, and weight loss, while Aretaeus of Cappadocia gave the first full clinical and empathic account of the signs, symptoms, and deep dis­comfort experienced by patients. Islamic medicine brought few contributions to diabetology, as did the Schola Medica Salernitana in the Middle Ages. In 1676, Thomas Willis was the first to establish a distinction between diabetes “mellitus,” where the urine is as sweet as honey, and the other forms of polyuria, and Matthew Dobson demonstrated in 1776 that the sweet taste was due to the presence of sugars capable of fermentation. This led John Rollo, Surgeon-General of the Royal Artillery, to strictly limit carbohydrates in his “rancid” diet. Finally, in 1815, the French chemist Michel-Eugène Chevreul identified the sugar as glucose, opening the way to its quantitation for diagnostic and therapeutic purposes. In 1806, the Englishman Willian Hyde Wollaston showed the presence of sugar in the blood, and in 1855 Claude Bernard theorized that diabetes was the result of overproduction of glucose by the liver. Also in France, Apollinaire Bouchardat suggested the suppression of bread and almost all other carbohydrates from the diet but conceded their partial reintroduction after the disappearance of glycosuria, which the patients could detect by tasting their own urine, a first in self-management! Finally, in 1889, von Mering and Minkowski published their paper on pancreatic diabetes, opening the way to 30 years of search for a pancreatic extract that could have therapeutic value.

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The onset of disproportionate urination has been known since the mists of time, as was the notion that urines emitted in large quantity were often sweet and had the property of attracting bees, flies and other arthropods, or even vertebrates.