The Pissing Evil: Or, Diabetes Back in the Day

This post is by Caroline!

Did you ever play that game when you were a kid? You know……”If you could travel back in time, where would you go?” Yeah, don’t deny it. I bet you still fantasize about days gone by when you encounter some obnoxious Jersey Shore wannabe smacking her gum and yammering away on her Blackberry. For me, I wanted to go back to pioneer times when I was a wee grade schooler. Something about rolling across the country, forging new paths, and especially eating nothing but biscuits and bacon really appealed to me. Now, I only want to go as far as the 70′s…..mostly so that I could experience the glory of Bruce Springsteen during his Born to Run heyday and then witness the meteoric rise of U2 right after. Super fangirl here, move right along…

The musical loves of my life aside, there’s really no reason anymore that I would want to travel back in time. Because, as opposed to little second-grade pioneering me, I now have diabetes. And let’s face it: managing diabetes back in the day sucked. Like a vacuum cleaner.

I went to see my primary care doctor last week, after my blood sugar was stubbornly stuck around 270 for days, despite some wicked boluses, low-carb eating, a site change, and a cartridge change. When I tested positive for ketones– for the first time in years!– I threw my hands up and scheduled an appointment. (The upside to working in a clinic: all the doctors are right there!) Being a curmudgeon, he lectured me for a while about why he thinks it’s a bad idea for people– diabetic or not– to run marathons, at which I just nodded politely and thought, Yeah uh huh. No way. Then he told me, in essence, that he couldn’t tell me what was going on because there are just so many variables to diabetes that we don’t understand. He reassured me that I was not going to keel over from a few days of highs and, to further prove his point, reached up on his shelf and handed me a book. “This is all about the history of diabetes,” he said. “Lots of people did fine with very crude treatment. Now, promise to give the book back sometime, OK?” (The other advantage to working in a clinic.)

So I started reading. And promptly got on my knees and thanked God for the year 2010. Why? Here follow some choice excerpts from bygone physicians themselves, or from the author, Robert Tattersall:

“Diabetes is…a melting down of the flesh and limbs into urine…the flow is incessant, as if from the opening of aqueducts…The melting is rapid, the death speedy. Moreover, life is disgusting and painful.” – Arataeus, Turkish physician from the second century AD

“Tasting the urine was a relatively standard part of medical practice…the urine [of diabetics] was exceedingly sweet…Francis Home [a physician] treated two diabetic patients in 1780. When Home tasted their blood, neither seemed sweet, which surprised him.” –Tattersall (Consuming body fluids aside, Tattersall then goes on to describe how Dr. Home mixed his patients’ urine with yeast and fermented it into a “tolerable small beer.” Piss brew?!)

“In 1870, during the siege of Paris in the Franco-Prussian war, the French physician Apollonaire Bouchardat (1806-86) noticed that glucose disapeared from the urine in some of his patients as a result of starvation– all subsequent wars have been shown to be ‘good for diabetes’ in the sense that the incidence rates and mortality of type 2 fall. Bouchardat’s advice to diabetics was ‘mangez le moins possible’ [Babelfish informs me that this means 'eat the least possible]. This was carried a step further by the Italian-born physician Guglielmo Guelpa (1850-1930), who worked in Paris. In 1896 he showed that fasting and saline enemas made diabetics sugar free in three days. He attributed this to the elimination of waste products and toxins and claimed equally dramatic results in asthma, epilepsy, migraine, eczema, and various eye conditions.” –Tattersall

Enemas and starvation, however, do not compare to this doozy of a treatment, published by John Rollo in his 1797 book, ‘An Account of Two Cases of Diabetes Mellitus’:

“First, the diet to consist of animal food principally, and to be thus regulated:

Breakfast: 1.5 pints of milk and half a pint of lime water mixed together; bread and butter.

Lunch: Plain blood puddings, made of blood and suet only.

Dinner: Game or old meats which have been long kept; and as far as the stomach may bear, fat and rancid old meats, as pork. To eat in moderation.

Supper: The same as breakfast.

“Secondly, a drachm of potash [aka, a mixture of potassium salts used in fertilizers] to be dissolved in four quarts of water which has been boiled, and to be used for daily drink. No other article whatever, either eatable, or drinkable, to be allowed, than what has been stated.

“Thirdly, the skin to be anointed with hog’s lard every morning. Flannel to be worn next to the skin. The gentlest exercise only to be permitted, but confinement to be preferred.

“Fourthly, a draught at bedtime of 20 drops of tartarized antimonial wine and 25 of tincture of opium; and the quantities to be gradually increased. In reserve as substances diminishing action, tobacco and foxglove.

“Fifthly, an ulceration about the size of a half crown to be produced and maintained externally, and immediately opposite to each kidney.

“Sixthly, a pill of equal parts aloes and soap to keep the bowels regularly open.”

So there you go! If you play the “let’s go back in time” game, you too, could be the lucky winner of a life of rotten meat, laxatives, and festering open wounds! I’ll keep my feet planted in 2010, thank you very much.

Actually, can I just skip ahead to the future?