Frederick Madison Allen

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Frederick Madison Allen (1879–1964) was a doctor who is perhaps best remembered today for his work on a diet for sufferers of diabetes mellitus. Born in Iowa, he later studied medicine in California, after which time he was employed in a poorly paid position at Harvard University, before his work in New Jersey and in Boston, Massachusetts, around about 1919. His interest in diabetes gave him the idea of a "starvation diet" for diabetic patients, and he opened the Physiatric Institute in Morristown, New Jersey, the world's first clinic for sufferers of diabetes mellitus, on April 26, 1921.^[1]^[2]

Before Frederick Banting first used insulin to treat diabetes, in 1922, Allen was recommending a diet which could prolong the lives of sufferers of diabetes mellitus, a fatal illness at the time. This diet involved drastic reduction of calorie, especially carbohydrate, intake, sometimes involving as little as 8% of calorie intake coming from carbohydrates. Although this could reduce incidence of glycosuria in people with diabetes mellitus, it did not prolong life by more than a few years. As Williams and Pickup (2004) note, the advances made in our understanding of diabetes in the late nineteenth century were not matched by great advances in treatment until Banting's isolation of insulin; these authors note how people with diabetes mellitus who did act for active treatment would opt to go on the starvation diet recommended by Allen.

Allen was not the first person to recommend treatment of diabetes by diet; as Ramachandran and Viswanathan (1998) point out, dietary treatment of diabetes mellitus was used in ancient Egypt as long ago as 3,500 B.C., and was being used in India about 2,500 years ago. These authors note that in the eighteenth century, John Rollo had observed that glycosuria in diabetics could be reduced if sufferers of diabetes mellitus reduced the quantity of their food consumed. However, Allen became famous in his own day for his recommendations, and Allen and his co-workers published their work on the diabetic diet in 1919, in a work entitled "Total Dietary Regulation in the Treatment of Diabetes". Today, however, diabetologists would take quite different views on this subject to those promoted by Allen. Indeed, Joslin, in 1922, suggested different diet recommendations to those of Allen, suggesting a reduction of fat rather than carbohydrate, with the overall goal of reduction in calorie intake (Hockaday, 1981). Allen has been named as one of the two leading diabetologists, along with Elliott P. Joslin, in the period 1910 to 1920, and later worked at the Rockefeller Institute.

[edit] See also

Diabetic diet

[edit] References

^ Bunn, Austin. "THE WAY WE LIVE NOW: 3-16-03: BODY CHECK; The Bittersweet Science", The New York Times, March 16, 2003. Accessed January 27, 2008. "Allen's starvation diet was a particular cruelty.... But nobody had a better way than Allen to extend lives. If the fasting wasn't working and symptoms got worse, Allen insisted on more rigorous undernourishment. In his campaigns to master their disease, Allen took his patients right to the edge of death, but he justified this by pointing out that patients faced a stark choice: die of diabetes or risk inanition, which Allen explained as starvation due to inability to acquire tolerance for any living diet. The Physiatric Institute became a famine ward."
^ "NEW MEDICAL INSTITUTE.; Jersey Institution for Diabetes and Metabolic Disorders Opens.", The New York Times, April 27, 1921. Accessed January 27, 2008.

[edit] Sources

Hockaday, T.D.R. (1981). Should the diabetic diet be based on carbohydrate of fat restriction? In M. Turner & B. Thomas (eds.). Nutrition and Diabetes. London : Libbey, 1981. pp23-32.ISBN 0861960084
Ramachandran, A. & Viswanathan, M. (1998). Dietary management of diabetes mellitus in India and South Asia. In K.G.M.M. Alberti, R.A. DeFronzo & P. Zimmet (eds.). International textbook of diabetes mellitus. pp773-777. Chichester : Wiley, 1997.
Williams, G. & Pickup, J. (2004). The handbook of diabetes (third edition). Oxford : Blackwell Science, 2004. ISBN 1405120525