To be written ..

Well-written and fascinating to read - Bliss manages to make the long account of lab work by Banting and Best into a page turner, a feat in and of itself, but his book also does a great job of showcasing the horror of pre-insulin diabetes, the magnitude of insulin's impact on treatment of the disease, and the sometimes sloppy process by which this discovery (and I'm sure many other great ones) was made.

Written in the 80s, so not the most up to date on Diabetes research, which is perfectly fine as long as you realize this. The writing was engaging, and the research was well done without detracting from the nature of the storytelling. I loved learning details that I never knew about the physiology and history of Insulin.

This book highlights the events and research that led up to the discovery of insulin and how it affected the world. While I think this is a great book, I do need to warn people that there are a lot of dead dogs and dead kids in this book. Dying from diabetes is slow and painful and the author does not hold back any details. Honestly, it just makes it even more horrifying that some people joke about getting diabetes from eating unhealthy food since it's barely been 100 years since diabetes wasn't a horrifying death sentence.

The only criticisms I have about this book is that it was very European and North American-centric. The book doesn't even mention that ancient Egyptians discovered diabetes and had a very clever method of diagnosing diabetes before the ancient greeks. Since instead of drinking urine as the Europeans did thousands of years later, the ancient Egyptians used ants to detect if there was sugar in the urine.

Then another thing I wished was included in this book was an explanation of the different types of diabetes and how they are different. Since the book almost implies that the main difference between type one and type two diabetes to be the age the person is diagnosed with diabetes rather than the way that the body stops producing insulin. This is weird since this book is supposed to be about diabetes and its history but it doesn't even mention the modern understanding of diabetes. Though it did mention the prejudice people have against diabetics and how some of even the first people to get treated with insulin tried hiding their disease from even their loved ones.

Overall I think that this book is good and is very informative on the effects of untreated diabetes and the importance of insulin to diabetes. Though if you wanted a full and complete understanding of diabetes you would have to pair this book with a few others since it does not mention modern treatment, the side effects of diabetes that insulin does not treat, the different types of diabetes, or the different ways insulin stops getting produced by the body.

I read this book for a project at work in 2006 and totally forgot about it until I found a review online. Absolutely loved it.

Not a gripping read, but a very interesting story.

I should have written this review a while ago, but I didn't, and the review will suffer for it. I don't think my fascination with this book is completely related to my son's having diabetes. Maybe I'm fooling myself. It's simply amazing how the discovery of insulin came about; simply amazing that it came about at all, given how this story played out. It was the most exciting nonfiction book I've read in quite some time.