Did Cavemen Get Diabetes? History of Diabetes and Medicine

When Was Diabetes First Discovered?

Way before the first Invokana lawsuit settlement was claimed, people were dealing with diabetes. It is currently believed that the very first acknowledgement of well-known diabetes symptoms was noted in 1552 B.C. An Egyptian doctor, known as Hesy-Ra recorded the symptoms. Hesy-Ra documented that some Egyptians were exhibiting unnaturally frequent urination and signs of emaciation, two common symptoms of modern diabetes. It was also around this time that it was documented that ants seemed to be strangely interested in the urine of these individuals, likely due to the increased glucose in their bodies.

In 150 A.D., a Greek physician named Arateus, depicted what we now know as diabetes as “the melting down of flesh and limbs into urine”. This makes sense because today we know that if diabetes goes untreated lower limb amputation can be necessary. Many years later there were individuals known as “water tasters”. Water tasters job was to diagnose, what we know today as diabetes. They would do this by drinking urine of people that showed signs of the disease; if the urine tasted sweet they were assumed to have diabetes. The real changes in the way diabetes was diagnosed happened in the 1800s when scientists created chemical tests in order to determine if you had the condition or not.

What Were The Early Treatments For Diabetes?

The more that early doctors learned about diabetes the more they learned how to manage it. One of the earliest known treatments, that were thought to cure the need for excessive urination, was horseback riding. During the late 1700s and early 1800s physicians began to take notice that dieting could help manage the condition. They would recommend diets that consisted of things like eating only animal meat and fat, or eating high amounts of sugar.

In the early 1870s, during the Franco-Prussian war, French doctor Apollinaire Bouchardat discovered that diabetic patient’s symptoms were relieved due to war food rationing. From learning this, the doctor began to create personalized diets as treatments for his patients. This development was the beginning of multiple fad diets throughout the very early 1900s, diets such as; the potato diet, starvation diets, and the oat-cure. One of the oldest practices that is still used by doctors today, was created by the Boston scientist, Elliott Joslin. Joslin published textbooks on how fasting diets paired with exercise greatly reduced the chances of death in diabetic patients.

When Was Insulin Founded?

Even with the multiple advances made in treating and diagnosing diabetes, without insulin diabetic patients were still dying prematurely. During the early 1900s German scientist Georg Zuelzer, discovered that injecting diabetic patients with the content of the human pancreas helped manage the patient’s conditions. The first use of insulin occurred in 1920. Canadian doctor, Frederick Banting, came up with the idea to use insulin to alleviate diabetes symptoms. This theory was first tested on animals and, was first used to treat human patients in 1922. The medical team was awarded the Nobel Prize for Medicine the next year in 1923.

Medicine has come a long way since the recorded past. Scientists and doctors constantly think of new and more effective treatments for diseases as the years go by. You can only imagine were medicine will take us in the future. It is possible that one day a cure to diabetes will be found.