History of diabetes

The first evidence of diabetes was recorded in the Egyptian Papyrus written in 1500 Bc and was discovered by Egyptologist Georg Ebers in Ad 1862 during the excavation of an ancient grave in Thebes.

It was within this document that a condition of "too great emptying of urine" was noted, perhaps a reference to the syndrome of diabetes.

Madhumeh (honey urine) was graphically described as a common disease by more than one Indian physician, notably Charaka (c AD 150).

Diabetes has also been recognized in China for thousands of years, where it is attributed to yin deficiency and treated with an integrated approach that involves more than lowering blood glucose.

Aretaeus of Cappadocia, a Greek physician who practiced in Rome and Alexandria in the second century AD, was the first to distinguish between what we now call diabetes mellitus and diabetes insipidus. In his work On the Causes and Indications of Acute and Chronic Diseases, he gave detailed account of diabetes mellitus and made several astute observations, noting, for example, that the onset of diabetes commonly follows acute illness, injury, or emotional stress.

Avicenna (A 980-1037), a famous Arab physician in Iran, clearly described diabetes mellitus and the “residue of honey” in the urine.

Willis in 1673 was the first doctor in modern Europe to describe, however briefly, that diabetic urine tasted ‘wonderfully sweet as if imbue with honey or sugar”.

Mathew Dobson

In 1774, Mathew Dobson, a physical practicing in Liverpool, discovered that the blood as well as the urine in diabetes, contains sugar, and from this observation he justly confirmed that the saccharine matter found in the urine is not formed in but only excreted by the kidneys.

William Prout (1785–1850) was the first to describe diabetic coma and Wilhelm Petters in 1857 demonstrated the presence of acetone in the urine of patients with diabetes. Adolf Kussmaul (1822–1902) proposed that acetonemia was the cause of diabetic coma.

Dr. Frederick Banting and his team used insulin to successfully treat a diabetic patient in 1922.
History of diabetes