It was less than a hundred years ago, in 1922, when two doctors from Philadelphia made a discovery that would eventually save the lives of millions of people suffering from diabetes. Frederick Banting and his assistant Charles Best already knew, based on the work of previous researchers, that the key to discovering what caused high blood sugar in diabetics—and what might keep it steady at healthy levels—could be found in the pancreas.
Two German researchers in 1889 had already zeroed in on the idea that the pancreas held the key for finding how blood sugar was regulated. After removing the pancreases of dogs, they discovered that the dogs’ blood sugar would build up and increase to dangerous levels. Soon the dogs would develop symptoms of diabetes and eventually die.
Subsequent research would hone in on particular cells in the pancreas that produced hormones that helped to metabolize glucose . Named after a German scientist, Paul Langerhans, the discovery of these “islets of Langerhans” (cells) would soon lead to a major breakthrough in the understanding of why diabetes develops in some people, but not in others.
Eventually, it was discovered that one particular hormone—insulin—was absent in the pancreas of those with diabetes. It was insulin, they realized, that was responsible for regulating blood sugar.
With this knowledge firmly established, Banting and Best set out to extract the insulin from dogs and eventually cattle so they could test it on human subjects. By 1922 they felt confident enough to test the insulin they had extracted from animals and injected it into a 14-year-old boy suffering from diabetes.
Within a day, the boy’s abnormally high blood sugar levels were brought down to a safe level. Eventually, word of the experiment and its success would spread like wildfire around the world. leading to a Nobel Prize in Medicine being awarded to Banting and his lab supervisor John McLeod in 1923.
Before the discovery of insulin, there wasn’t much a doctor could do in treating their diabetic patients. Doctors knew that a high carbohydrate diet seemed to lead to higher levels of blood sugar so they often directed their patients to drastically cut back on their consumption of carbohydrates.
In more severe cases, some doctors would put their diabetic patients on starvation diets, limiting their caloric intake to just a few hundred calories a day. These intense dietary interventions may have bought their patients a couple more years of life, but they were not sustainable over time. And the quality of life of someone forced to continuously restrict their caloric intake to starvation levels could hardly be considered an effective, or even humane, long-term treatment.
Fortunately, thanks to the hard work of doctors like Banting and Best, medical science has made enormous progress over the past one hundred years. But because we can sometimes be so caught up with our own daily struggles and challenges dealing with our diabetes, we can sometimes forget just how lucky we are to be living during this time of human history.
Earlier generations had to resort to starvation diets to deal with a diagnosis of diabetes and their prospects for a long life were extremely thin. If one wasn’t stricken with diabetes, there was also the risk of contracting other deadly diseases for which there were no known cures or vaccines, such as polio, measles, and smallpox.
Throughout our busy lives, we can oftentimes feel that staying healthy is too much of a struggle, one that continually tests our resolve and willpower. We can be bombarded with thoughts such as, “Why can’t I eat those foods that every one else is enjoying at this party?” or “It’s not fair that I can’t enjoy those delicious looking donuts just sitting there on the table.”
It’s helpful to recognize that dealing with our diabetes today, despite all of its inconveniences and sacrifices, is so much easier than it was just a hundred years ago. But we can sometimes take all of these medical advances and treatments for granted.
But it’s not at all unusual to take a lot of other things in our life for granted. Running water, automobiles, 2-day shipping, and, for the Milennials, smart phones and WiFi. No matter how incredible some of these modern technologies and conveniences are, we tend to forget that there was a time when previous generations lived without them.
It’s easy to forget that many vaccines and medicines, such as penicillin and insulin, were unavailable to those who came before us. Being grateful for what we have, rather than bitter over things we don’t, can help us get through this long and difficult journey.
References:
http://diabetesstopshere.org/2012/08/21/the-history-of-a-wonderful-thing-we-call-insulin/
https://www.thoughtco.com/history-of-diabetes-how-insulin-1991637
http://centennial.rucares.or/index.php?page=Dietary_Therapy_Diabetes
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3062586/
https://www.vox.com/science-and-health/2016/11/14/13622212/frederick-banting-diabetes-insulin-google-doodle
https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s00125-007-0641-0
