The Starvation Treatment of Diabetes

Before insulin arrived in 1921, diabetes was a death sentence. This 1915 clinical manual documents the only treatment that offered hope: systematic starvation. Written by Lewis Webb Hill at Massachusetts General Hospital, it preserves the revolutionary (and harrowing) methods developed by Dr. Frederick M. Allen, who discovered that precisely controlled caloric restriction could extend diabetic patients' lives by months or even years. The book walks practitioners through the entire protocol. Patients began with a brutal starvation phase, consuming little more than whiskey or broth to eliminate sugar from their systems entirely. Then came the painstaking reintroduction of foods, each item calculated by carbohydrate and protein content, every calorie measured. Hill provides recipes, meal plans, and exact caloric targets. The language is clinical, the tone pragmatic, but the underlying desperation is unmistakable. Today, this volume reads like a medical time capsule: a record of physicians doing everything they could with the crude tools available before the discovery that would change everything. It's essential reading for anyone interested in the history of medicine, the evolution of diabetes treatment, or the strange and terrible things we once did to stay alive.