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105
[1908
During the year it caused 21 deaths, 10 being males and 11 females, of
whom 16 were between 45 and 75 years of age.
During the last 10 years it has resulted in the death of 254 persons, or an
average of 25 per annum. It is unfortunately one of those diseases for which
science has found no special cure, but it is also one about which constant
investigations are being made.
The disease was apparently known so far back as the seventh century,
when Susruta, a physician who lived in India, recognised a disease in which
the urine tasted sweet. A thousand years later the sweet taste of diabetic urine
was described by Thomas Wilson, and after the lapse of another 100 years
(1775), Dobson showed that the sweet taste was due to sugar.
The great French physiologist, Claude Bernard, made a special study of
it, in the course of which he discovered that an animal could convert sugar which
had been taken into its body as food into the form of starch called glycogen,
and retain it in its liver, and that then this glycogen could be converted
into sugar as the tissue needed it.
Other pathololigsts had noticed abnormalities of the pancreas (a gland
which discharges its secretion into the intestine) in connection with diabetes,
but when death ensued, after this gland was examined no evidence of disease
could be found, even under the microscope, for, unfortunately, the microscope
does not always indicate a change of function.
Von Mering and Minkowski at a later period demonstrated the relationship
between the pancreas and diabetes by removing the pancreas from dogs, when
the disease followed. It was found that these dogs could not oxidise sugar
accumulated in the blood, and consequently they eliminated it in the urine.
Minkowski also found that if a small piece of the pancreas was left in the
body, diabetes either did not occur, or was less severe than after the removal
of the whole gland, and in addition he discovered that if the pancreas was
removed completelv, the severe type of the disease was set up, but that if he theft
transplanted a piece of an active pancreas into the abdominal cavity of the
sick dog, the diabetes was diminished as long as the piece of gland remained
functional.
He also made further experiments which proved most satisfactorily the
connection between disease of the pancreas and diabetes or glycosuria.
Up to the present no cure for diabetes has been found, as stated above,
but there is every hope that science may some day discover a remedy.
The following table shows the deaths that have occurred in Islington
during the last 11 years, together with the age and sex of the deceased.