History of diabetes - Articles

Diabetes is one of the oldest diseases we know that still exists. Oldest papyrus texts about something that seems to describe diabetes have been found at two separate places, in India and Egypt (1, 2), without any naming of the disease. They are both believed to be around 3500 years old. There is a disagreement who first used the term diabetes. Credited have been to Aretaeus of Cappadocia, which at least is true coming to a sort of more clinical description of diabetes around 200 AD. Some instead credit Demetrius of Apamea who may have used it first, around 200 BC. Diabetes comes from the Greek word διαβαίνειν (diabainein), "to pass through, which is composed of δια- (dia-), meaning "through" and βαίνειν (bainein), to go. This is a description for polyuria, the big amounts of urine linked to untreated diabetes (3, 4, 5). Mellitus for "sweet like honey" (mellitus is Latin for honey) was added by British Thomas Willis around 1670, due to the taste of urine.

Diabetes was long thought to be some kind of kidney failure until British Matthew Dobson 1776 found that the sweet taste in the urine was sugar. He found the same in blood, in fact he found hyperglycemia. First to describe different form of diabetes was Sir Harold Himsworth, who published a paper in the Lancet 1936 (6). He described for the first time insulin resistance and called the different forms of diabetes "insulin sensitive" and "insulin insensitive". It seems his hypothesis was almost forgotten, at least accepted years later. Today we know both type 1 but particular type 2 diabetes are more heterogeneous diseases.

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