Diabetes mellitus, affectionately referred to as just "diabetes" by almost everyone who has ever heard of the disease, is a condition you would not want to wish upon your worst enemy. Aside from forcing you to amendment almost every aspect of your lifestyle (say goodbye to All-You-Can-Eat wing night), it could lead to a chain of unfortunate complications, such as having your foot cut off and that pesky little thing known as death. Terrifying aspects of a disease that can strike without warning aside, here are just plenty of interesting facts overlooked by almost everyone.
Have you ever wondered what the mellitus tacked on to the end of diabetes really capacity? Aside from being a complex word to make it sound more medical-y, it really has a desirable albeit slightly disturbing history to it. In 1675, a physician by the name of Thomas Willis, added the term, which is the Latin word for "honey," in consequence of the taste of the urine diabetes patients being deemed sweet. Although not the first person to notice this (it's been known for well over a thousand years), the reason for its honey-sweet taste is courtesy of Matthew Dobson, who in 1776 discovered its source to be a build-up of a particular kind of sugar in the urine and blood.
Diabetes is all about urine. But what does that name really mean? Like many medical terms, its history and meaning lies in the language of the historic Greeks. It was coined by Aretaeus the Cappadocian, a second-century AD physician who noticed that those with the condition urinated frequently and gave off the appearance of "leaking water." He named it diabetes, which comes from the Greek word , which when parsed is composed of the prefix "dia," meaning "across or apart, " and "bainein," meaning "to walk or stand." When put together it capacity "to straddle," with the noun form meaning "one who straddles" (diab"t"s).
To be more precise, the word additionally capacity "compass" or "siphon." It wasn't until 1425 when the term "diabete" was used to describe the condition in English.
Despite being highly manageable today, the ancients who first discovered the condition considered it to be an automatic death sentence. According to Victor Corneliu Medvei in his book The History of Clinical Endocrinology, despite Aretaeus' attempts at treating the disease, he considered a diagnosis of this new condition to result in a life that is "short, disgusting and painful."
In short, historic conceptions of diabetes can be summed up in two words: urine and pain.
No comments:
Post a Comment