The Bittersweet Science

Eleven-year-old Elizabeth Hughes was born in 1907 in the New York State governor’s mansion. She was daughter of Charles E. Hughes, who became a justice on the Supreme Court. Elizabeth had perfect normal royal life until she come home from friend’s birthday party. She was not satisfied with her thirstiness, she kept drinking but she was insatiable thirst. Elizabeth became thin, always hungry, and tire. In 1919, Elizabeth parents took here to famous Dr. Frederick Allen in Moristown, New Jersey. Dr. Frederick examined Elizabeth and diagnosed diabetes. Dr. Frederick starts starving Elizabeth as many other doctors would do the same at that time. Diabetes doesn’t come from eating too much sugar, or eating too much food. It is result of glucose soaks in to blood cell, which is our main energy source, and not using as energy, and all the sugar from glucose exhaust from our body. Because glucose is not using it as energy, people who have diabetes become always hungry and thirsty. In many Centuries, effective treatment was not founded. According from the Bunn’s article, at the time of early 1900s, physicians were extremely confuse by two types of diabetes: type 1, known as “juvenile diabetes,” which is more extreme but less common than type 2, which known as “adult onset,” result of obesity and overeating. With type 1 diabetes, pancreas stops secreting insulin, a hormone that instructs the blood to use sugar in the blood for energy (Bunn, p. 33). Elizabeth had type 1 diabetes, Dr. Allen fasted Elizabeth with very low carbohydrates about 400 to 600 calories a day without sugar for several weeks when it was 2,400 to 2,600 calories are normal for her age. Elizabeth came thinner and weaker; she only weighted seventy-five pounds and was nearly five feet tall. Dr. Allen’s “starvation diet” was crude, the method put patient right to the edge of life; many patient could not follow his method. It was simply too hard for patient to starving for not raise sugar level of blood. In 1922, two young clinician successes to provide filtered insulin inject to the body; so that sugar level in the blood dropped to normal like normal pancreases secreting insulin. It was new method of treating diabetes; patients didn’t have to starve to death for worrying sugar level goes high in the blood cells. After Dr. Allen follows new treatment of diabetes, Elizabeth started getting better; in first week after the first injection, she was up to 1,220 calories a day then 2,200 calories in next week. That fall, several hundred North American diabetics pulled back from the edge of starving to death. In same year Dr. Banting won the Nobel Prize. Elizabeth died age of seventy four years old after she reared three children, drank and smoked. We are still need to find new treatment for many diseases, we can save hundreds people who is in pain and hopeless sickness. We can give them a joy, hope and pass real meaning of life when they could fight with their diseases; Elizabeth wrote to her mother, day after her first injection, in 1922. “It is simply too wonderful for words.” (The New York Times Magazine, p. 37).