When Was Diabetes Discovered?

While diabetes has been recognised since time immemorial, and people in many regions of the world were able to concoct effective cures to treat various ailments during the Middle Ages (even though the efficacy of these treatments was short-lived), the cure for diabetes was explained to the world in a simple manner mainly in the 20th century.

The first experiment in the field of research on diabetes was conducted by the European scientists Joseph von Mering and Oskar Minkowski in 1899. They tried to explain the role of the pancreas in the spread of diabetes by removing the pancreas of dogs. It was seen that the dogs whose pancreas were removed showed all the signs and symptoms which are commonly associated with patients who suffer from diabetes and died immediately afterwards.

The term insulin was coined in 1910 by Sir Edward Albert Sharpey-Schafer, a Scotsman from Edinburgh, who pinpointed that people who suffer from diabetes are deficient in a (until then unnamed) chemical produced by the pancreas. He proposed calling this chemical insulin, and the word has been in existence ever since.

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