Three Interesting Facts about Diabetes Mellitus

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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 change almost every aspect of your lifestyle (say goodbye to All-You-Can-Eat wing night), it could lead to a series 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 some interesting facts overlooked by almost everyone.

Have you ever wondered what the mellitus tacked on to the end of diabetes actually means? Aside from being a fancy word to make it sound more medical-y, it actually has an interesting albeit slightly disturbing history to it. In 1675, a doctor by the name of Thomas Willis, added the term, which is the Latin word for "honey," due to 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 specific kind of sugar in the urine and blood.

Diabetes is all about urine. But what does that name actually mean? Like many medical terms, its history and meaning lies in the language of the ancient 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 means "to straddle," with the noun form meaning "one who straddles" (diab"t"s).

To be more specific, the word also means "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, ancient conceptions of diabetes can be summed up in two words: urine and pain.