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Aretaeus not solely gave us our 1st correct description of diabetes, he also urged the origin of the name of the disease. “The fluid,” he wrote, “uses the patient’s body as a ladder to flee downward.” The Greek word for ladder is Diabaiton. Webster’s Unabridged Dictionary derives “diabetes” through the Latin from the Greek word that means “to square with legs apart,” as within the position of a ladder. Though Aretaeus knew the signs and symptoms of diabetes, he recognized solely the severer forms of the disease and accordingly thought of it a rare and fatal malady. In common with all different ancient writers, he had no idea of its cause or proper treatment. Fourteen centuries a lot of elapsed before the next step forward was made along the road to a true knowledge of the nature of diabetes.

Whereas this step appears simple, it took a hardy scientist with a robust nature to create it, and its results were so much-reaching. For it had been then that Thomas Willis, the foremost successful physician of the Restoration, described the sweet style of diabetic urine. First stimulated by the publication in 1552 of the Latin translation of Aretaeus’ work3 and now greatly augmented by Thomas Willis, investigations of diabetes became a number in the following years. Soon the adjective “mellitus” was added to the name. Derived from the Latin word mel, that means honey, it acknowledged the very fact that sweetness had something important to do with this strange disease. But still nobody had any inkling why. Throughout the nineteenth century the incidence of diabetes seemed to extend over that of ancient times. Additional and a lot of cases were observed and studied. The relationship to acidosis and the peculiar death in coma became fairly well known. But now something happened that has occurred therefore typically within the march of science. An epochal discovery was made quite by accident.

It absolutely was Oskar Minkowski, born in Russia in 1858, who brought the story of diabetes into our own times (he died solely twenty years ago). In 1889 Minkowski had an argument along with his associate, von Mering, and to settle it they removed the pancreas from a dog to work out if the animal might live while not it. The dog died. Other dogs on whom Minkowski repeated the experiment also died. And what they died of was identical in each respect to human diabetes. Before dying the dogs passed excessive amounts of urine that contained from 5 to ten per cent sugar.4 Currently we tend to were getting somewhere at last. When 3 thousand years of observing that diabetics passed excessive amounts of urine—a truth that would logically have led to the belief that the disease had something to do with the kidneys—it had been accidentally discovered that the cause should he within the pancreas.