Metabolism in Diabetes Mellitus TOGETHER WITH A Study of Metabolism in Severe Diabetes Mellitus

1910-12 BENEDICT AND JOSLIN'S ORIGINAL PIONEERING REPORTS OF METABOLIC STUDIES OF DIABETICS BEFORE DISCOVERY OF INSULIN.
Two 17x24 cm hardcover volumes with library bound publications issued in printed paper wraps--original covers affixed to boards bound with cloth spines and titles neatly handlettered in ink on spines. Bookplate of University Library Reading with "withdrawn" handstamp below to front paste-down and bookplate to back cover of each volume. Vol. I, i-vi, errata slip laid in, frontispiece photograph of "General view of the respiration calorimiter laboratory", 135 pp, [list of publications of Nutrition Laboratory], 141 tables, 24x90 cm (truncated) folding kymograph record . Vol. II, vi, 135 pp, 141 tables, [list of publications of Nutrition Laboratory]. Light edge-browning to covers and pages, bindings tight, pages and folding graph clean and crisp, very good in custom archival mylar covers.
FRANCIS GANO BENEDICT (1870 - 1957) was an American chemist, physiologist, and nutritionist who developed a calorimeter and a spirometer used to determine oxygen consumption and measure metabolic rate. Benedict attended Harvard University, earning his bachelor's degree in 1893 and his master's degree in 1894. He earned his Ph.D., magna cum laude at Heidelberg University in 1895. He was elected a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 1909. "William Welch and John Shaw Billings were impressed with Benedict's early publications on animal heat and metabolism, and they conviced the Carnegie Foundation trustees to establish a nutrition laboratory under Benedict's direction. The result was the Boston Nutrition Laboratory, where Benedict remained until his retirement (1907-1937)." (DSB 1.610/1.)
ELLIOTT PROCTOR JOSLIN (1869 - 1962) was the first doctor in the United States to specialize in diabetes and was the founder of today's Joslin Diabetes Center. He was the first to advocate for teaching patients to care for their own diabetes, and is also a recognized pioneer in glucose management, identifying that tight glucose control leads to fewer and less extreme complications. He was educated at Yale College and Harvard Medical School. He made diabetes his focus while attending Harvard Medical School, winning the Boylston Society prize for work later published as the book The Pathology of Diabetes Mellitus. His postgraduate training was at Massachusetts General Hospital, and he also studied with leading researchers in metabolism from Germany and Austria before starting a private medical practice in Boston's Back Bay in 1898. In 1908, in conjunction with physiologist Francis G. Benedict, Joslin carried out extensive metabolic balance studies examining fasting and feeding in patients with varying severities of diabetes. His findings would help to validate the observations of Frederick Madison Allen regarding the benefit of carbohydrate- and calorie-restricted diets. The patients were admitted to units at New England Deaconess Hospital, helping to initiate a program to help train nurses to supervise the rigorous diet program. Joslin included the findings from 1,000 of his own cases in his 1916 monograph The Treatment of Diabetes Mellitus. Here he noted a 20 percent decrease in the mortality of patients after instituting a program of diet and exercise. This physician's handbook had 10 more editions in his lifetime and established Dr. Joslin as a world leader in diabetes. When insulin became available as therapy in 1922, Joslin's corps of nurses became the forerunners of certified diabetes educators. The first hospital blood glucose monitoring system for pre-meal testing was developed under his direction in 1940 and was the forerunner of modern glucometers. Dr. Joslin was also the first to name diabetes a serious public health issue. Just after WWII, he expressed concern to the Surgeon General of the U.S. Public Health Service that diabetes was an epidemic and challenged the government to do a study in his hometown, Oxford, Massachusetts. The study was started in 1946 and carried out over the next 20 years. The results would later confirm Joslin's fear that the incidence of diabetes in the United States was approaching epidemic proportions.
J. S. MACDONALD Review of "Metabolism in Diabetes Mellitus" 1, Nature 85, 455-456 (02 February 1911): "The depth of the tragedy into which the most recent investigators of the disease 'diabetes mellitus,' whose observations are described in the memoir referred to below, have inquired, is sufficiently indicated by the fact that seven of their ten 'severe cases' have died since coming under observation in the early part of 1908. Diabetes is considered as being primarily a disturbance of nutrition tending to develop a condition of starvation, and yet it will 'be noted that in six of these cases the fatal result is attributed to 'diabetic coma.' Diabetic coma is in no sense due to any deprivation of nutriment experienced by the central nervous system, but rather to a very real poisoning assignable to an appearance in the blood of unusual chemical compounds or to an appearance of compounds in an unusual quantity which are normally present only in minute traces. Nutrition, in short, is not only deficient, leading to a great emaciation of the patient, but is also disordered, leading to death by internally developed poisons. Medical treatment of this disease, its causation having been fully developed prior to the arrival of the doctor, is therefore directed to maintain nutrition in very adverse circumstances by expert adjustments in the diet, and to secure the elimination, or at least neutralise, the effects due to the presence of these poisons. As a valuable contribution to our knowledge of the principles underlying such treatment, this account of the extremely precise and varied observations of Benedict and Joslin will meet with a wide welcome. (Inventory #: 1714)