Robert Tattersall, Diabetes

I would like to have had Robert Tattersall as my physician; instead, we all now have him as our indispensable new Virgil to guide us through the extraordinary history of diabetes. His book is suffused with a deep compassion for people who have the disease, not to mention a laudable passion for the colourful chronicle of this most maddening of disorders. An essential new work both for all endocrinologists and anyone with an interest in the history of medicine, it is unfortunately least reliable (by my reading) as it reaches the last two decades of research and treatment. Things start out looking dim, with a brief prologue smacking of the kind of generic encyclopaedic overview that can be found online anywhere, including definitions of medical terms like polydispia and polyphagia that are as unnecessary for physicians as they are off-putting for lay readers. Once into the real history, however, the book takes off, citing more historical sources and offering up more vivid anecdotes than any other book or article I have ever read on the subject, even while placing them in wide context. Discussing the search by nineteenth-century physicians for the internal secretions of the pancreas, for instance, he tells the amusing story of a researcher who believed that another secretion, the testicular fluid of animals, could rejuvenate the elderly, even increasing ‘the average length of his jet of urine ... by 25 per cent’ (p. 39)

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