Diabetes mellitus: present by historical perspective

Diabetes mellitus has been known from antic period, due to the sweet taste of the urine of this patients. The modern era of diabetes started in 1815 with the discovery made by the French chemist Eugène Chevreul, who found that the sweet substance from the diabetic urine was the same with the grapes sugar. At this point, the study of diabetes has had aproached several succesive objectivs: the development of chemical methods from determination of urinary and blood glucose and its physiological signification (A. Bouchardat, Claude Bernard); the discovery of the organ involved in diabetes (E. Lancereaux, P. Langerhans, von Mering and Minkowsky, E. Laguèsse); indirectly demonstration of the presence of a pancreatic antidiabetic substance, produced possible in the Langerhans islets (E. Hédon, E. Gley, G.L. Zuelzer), the discovery of antidiabetic hormone and full description of its metabolic functions (N.C. Paulescu); purification of the pancreatic extract by J. B. Collip and it’s utilization in diabetes treatment by J. MacLeod, F.G. Banting and C.H. Best; in an unprecedental hurry, the 1923 Nobel Prize for the physiological and experimental discovery of insulin (in fact made by Paulescu) and for its clinical application (in fact due to the purification of the pancreatic extract made by J. B. Collip), without factual reasons the Nobel Prize was awarded to Banting and MacLeod.