HOME HELP FEEDBACK SUBSCRIPTIONS ARCHIVE SEARCH TABLE OF CONTENTS		QUICK SEARCH:   [advanced] Author: Keyword(s): Year:  Vol:  Page:

This Article Full Text Full Text (PDF) Purchase Article View Shopping Cart Alert me when this article is cited Alert me if a correction is posted Services Email this article to a friend Similar articles in this journal Alert me to new issues of the journal Download to citation manager Request Permissions Citing Articles Citing Articles via Google Scholar Google Scholar Articles by Whitehouse, F. W. Search for Related Content PubMed Articles by Whitehouse, F. W. Social Bookmarking                What's this?

The Color Blue: Musings After 68 Years in the Diabetes Wars

The first 300 words of the full text of this article appear below.

Driving from California through Arizona on the way home to Texas in August 1938, we made frequent stops because my 8-year-old brother said he had to go to the toilet. "Go see what is going on," my mother directed me, then age 12. "We are stopping too often."

I reported back that Johnny was peeing a lot, and it was like water. "Oh! I hope it's not diabetes like my cousin Norman," my Mom replied. This was the first time I had heard the word diabetes. Later, she told us a brief story of 16-year-old cousin Norman, who had diabetes and had died in a coma in Connecticut while on the way to see a famous doctor in Boston, Mass., in 1919.

The day after we arrived home, my mother and brother visited our family doctor.

After Johnny came home from the hospital in Dallas, I learned to test his urine for sugar.

I was the resident chemist at our house because I had an amateur chemistry set from which I had made invisible ink, a chemical that smelled like rotten eggs, and some handsome dyes for cloth. I would put a teaspoon of a blue liquid called Benedict's solution into a test tube and add 10 drops of urine. Then, I'd place it in boiling water for 5 minutes. The solution might stay blue or it might turn green, yellow, orange, or brick red. Rarely, the solution stayed blue but had a red sediment at the bottom of the tube. Later, I became skilled enough to skip the boiling water and just hold the tube over a gas flame until a color developed. Rarely did it boil over; after all, I was a chemist. I learned that our favorite color was blue, for that meant no sugar in . . . [Full Text of this Article]

CiteULike    Del.icio.us    Digg    Reddit    Technorati    What's this?