The dietetic treatment of diabetes / by B.D. Basu.

  • Baman Das Basu
Date:
1915
Catalogue details

Licence: In copyright

Credit: The dietetic treatment of diabetes / by B.D. Basu. Source: Wellcome Collection.

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    WHAT IS DIABETES ? Hindu physicians of yore were perhaps the first in the world to diagnose what is called diabetes. Notwithstanding the researches of physiologists, pathologists and physicians in modern times, it is perhaps not too much to say that the aetiology and pathology of this disease remain as obscure to-day, as they were in the days of Charaka and Suflruta. Very truly has Sir J. F. Goodhart observed : — “ Diabetes shall be my between maid—in part functional, in part, perhaps, otherwise. What morbid anatomy have we not sought in this disease and have not found it ? Long, indeed, have many of us hovered over the alterations we had hoped to find and have not found them. Changes in the nervous system, in the pancreas, in the liver, in the blood, and so on. “ * * * The question has now to be answered, what causes this seemingly inveterate sugar craze on the part of the proteins ? This curious reversion, may we call it, to a plant¬ like metabolism in thus compounding with carbon to the rejection of its natural affinities. Is it nervous in—co-ordina¬ tion, or toxic disorganisation, or what? Again we seem to be driven back, cancer like, upon a loquacity of function, upon some misapplied vital energy behind the scenes with which as yet we cannot grapple.” [Harvein Oration on the passing of morbid anatomy ; delivered at the Koyal College of Physicians of London on St. Luke’s day, 1912.]
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