Book Reviews: Fatal Thirst: Diabetes in Britain Until Insulin.

Before the isolation of insulin in the early 1920s, the lives of people afflicted with Type 1 diabetes tended to be nasty and short, usually less than a year or two after the onset of their disease. This was true wherever diabetes struck, not only in Britain. If there had been a distinctive British approach to the treatment of diabetes in the pre-insulin era, if its incidence in Britain had been unusual, or if there had been exceptionally rich British sources describing diabetes and the diabetic life, Professor Elizabeth Furdell’s use of a national approach to her study would have made better sense than it does in this meandering, short, expensive, and not very enlightening monograph.