Diabetes mellitus did not come all of a sudden without any cause. Instead, it has come from Greek with the Greek word meaning of a siphon. A physician who originated from Greek and was well known with the name of Aretus the Cappadocian made up his mind to mention the condition with the name diabainein. It happened during the 2nd century A.D.
Aretus the Cappadocian attempted to make a description of the patients who were passing water in an excessive amount, or polyuria, like a siphon. How the Greek word came to diabetes was because the English speaking people adopted the word from the Medieval Latin which then turned out to be “diabetes”.
The term “mellitus” was given by the well known Thomas Willis not later by the year 1675. Yet, we commonly refer to the “diabetes mellitus” simply with “diabetes”, without mentioning the following “mellitus”.
Thomas Willis did not add the term “mellitus” for nothing. The reason that the Thomas Willis added the term “mellitus” is because the urine of the people who suffer from this diabetes mellitus does taste sweet. This is possible since they possess too much glucose in their blood which is not absorbable by the cells in their blood, resulting in excessive glucose which comes out along with the urine making it taste sweet.
The word mellitus itself derives from the Latin word “Mel”. Honey is what is the word attempts to represent. The people who suffer from this disease of diabetes mellitus possess excessive amount of glucose in their blood that makes their urine feel sweet. There might be a probability that the people at the old times did test the urine of the people who suffered from diabetes mellitus diseases so that they were able to say that the urine of the people was sweet. Then, the word diabetes mellitus itself could possibly mean that the people who suffer from diabetes mellitus siphon off sweet water.
In the old times China, people had been able to manage to observe that ants were somehow attracted to the urine of the people who suffered from the diabetes mellitus. It was very possible that it was due to the fact that the urine was sweet. They then started mentioning the disease with the name “Sweet Urine Disease”.
In the year 1776 in England, there was a man who was known as Dr. Matthew Dobson wrote that the sweetness was caused by sugar. Then, in the year 1889, Oskar Minkowski along with Drs. J.V. Mering proved that they were able to give diabetes to animals by removing the pancreas of the animals.
Meanwhile, in the year 1900, Dr. Eugene Opie showed that this diabetes mellitus had an association with a group of cells in the pancreas that degenerated and decided to call it islets of Langerhans. Banting, along with Best, showed in the year 1992, that some kind of proteins that they had been able to extract from the pancreas which they call insulin could help in controlling diabetes.