Diabetes Types: Cultural History of a Chronic Disease

Vanderbilt University, Nashville TN

Investigators

Linked publications, trials & patents

Abstract

? DESCRIPTION (provided by applicant): I am writing a cultural history of diabetes that examines the stories professional and popular writers in the United States have been telling for over a century about who gets diabetes and why. These stories have much to do with beliefs about race, class, heredity, and disease. At the turn of the last century, professional and popular writers alike considered diabetes to be a disease of the middle classes and of Jews in particular. Since the 1980s, the populations most at risk have been identified as Native American, African American, Hispanic/Latino, and the poor. This project charts the changing face of diabetes over the course of the century, while examining how cultural stereotypes about particular populations became embedded in allegedly neutral statements about differential susceptibilities to diabetes. Several excellent histories of diabetes exist that elucidate the scientific work leading up to the discovery of insulin, the complex and intricate battles behind the discovery of this Nobel Prize winning drug, and the impact of insulin on the control and management primarily of type 1 diabetes. My project's greatest innovations are to study the history of all forms of diabetes (not just type 1), and to bring the history of diabetes into conversation with scholarship on race, class, and disease. To get at the variety of meanings that have been ascribed to this disease over the course of the 20th century, I have examined an eclectic array of sources, including scientific and medical books and journal articles; newspaper accounts and magazine articles; patient records; archival collections of physicians and diabetics; songs; poems; memoirs; and films. The health relatedness of this project rests in its contribution to understanding one of the most serious public health problems of the 21st century. It seeks in particular to help in developing new and important theoretical frameworks for understanding the pathophysiology of societal inequalities. The anticipated final products include a book, several journal articles, and presentations at conferences.