Читать книгу Unveiling Diabetes - Historical Milestones in Diabetology - Группа авторов - Страница 16

Already in 1806, the Englishman Willian Hyde Wollaston (1766–1828) had shown the presence of sugar in the blood in a proportion of 1:30 to the amount found in urine and, in 1843, Thomas Watson also developed a method to measure glucose in the blood, the clinical use of which was seriously hampered by the requirement of at least 300 mL for a single assay. The first to show that the liver can release glucose into the blood and, more generally, to propose a model of the human body as a set of collaborating parts maintaining an internal balance (“milieu interieur”) was the Frenchman Claude Bernard (1813–1878), father of experimental medicine. This replaced the then dominant concept of various organs as separate entities not communicating with each other except through the ill-defined “humors.” Bernard theorized in 1855 that diabetes was the result of an overproduction of glucose by the liver, a revolutionary vision for its time and still valid today [23]. He found that ligation of the pancreatic ducts results in degeneration of the gland, an observation that was to carry important consequences. To him we also owe the first reliable method of measuring the concentration of glucose in the blood.