Sweet Blood: Diabetes and the Nature of Health in America

FAIN: FZ-250429-16

Matthew Klingle
Bowdoin College (Brunswick, ME 04011-8447)

Offering a new look at an illness afflicting over 29 million Americans, this book tells the environmental, cultural, political, and scientific history of diabetes in the United States from the Gilded Age to the present day.

“Sweet Blood: Diabetes and the Nature of Health in America,” under consideration by Yale University Press, is a path-breaking history of a major illness. Through incisive research and engaging storytelling, it explores how today’s crisis grows from our changing relationship with nature. It asks questions at the heart of the humanities: Who or what is to blame for the diabetes outbreak: human behavior, genetics and evolution, or an altered environment? Why has diabetes afflicted Americans unevenly, and should society address these inequities? And what connections between human nature and physical nature might promote and sustain health? The project illuminates these questions by examining the environmental, cultural, political, and scientific history of diabetes in the United States from the Gilded Age to the present day. In the process, this project argues for an expanded idea of what counts as the environment, an important contribution to address the diabetes epidemic.

Associated Products

The Multiple Lives of Marjorie: The Dogs of Toronto and the Co-Discovery of Insulin (Article)
Title: The Multiple Lives of Marjorie: The Dogs of Toronto and the Co-Discovery of Insulin
Author: Matthew Klingle
Abstract: From the Editor's Note by Finis Dunaway, Trent University: "The discovery of insulin could be told as a story of heroic scientists forging new frontiers of medical knowledge to save human lives. Such accounts, though, render invisible the role of animals in biomedical research and the relationships formed between human scientists and their animal subjects. In this issue’s Gallery essay, Matthew Klingle shows how visual images can complicate and enrich this human-centered narrative. Taking us to the University of Toronto in the early 1920s, Klingle looks at a series of photographs and other images of dogs used in diabetes research. He situates these pictures within the broader environmental context of an urban setting that provided university researchers with a steady supply of strays. Through a wide-ranging analysis of the visual record, Klingle addresses larger questions about the ethical debates over animal experimentation—from the critiques of the antivivisection movement during the early twentieth century to the views of some diabetics and diabetes activists today. His essay offers a model for scholars interested in representations of animals and illuminates the changing, contested meanings of images over time."
Year: 2018
Primary URL: http://academic.oup.com/envhis
Access Model: Subscription only with limited open access
Format: Journal
Periodical Title: Environmental History
Publisher: Oxford University Press

“Rendering Health: An Environmental History of Industrial Meat and Insulin" (Conference/Institute/Seminar)
Title: “Rendering Health: An Environmental History of Industrial Meat and Insulin"
Author: Matthew Klingle
Abstract: While the discovery of insulin at the University of Toronto in 1922 is a well-documented story, the conversion of that discovery into a widely used and life-saving pharmaceutical therapy is less well known. This seminar paper, based on a chapter of my book in progress, "Sweet Blood: Diabetes and the Changing Nature of Modern Health," explores how the rise of industrial meat production in North America coincided with the rise of the modern pharmaceutical industry. Using Eli Lilly and Company, the first firm to mass produce insulin, as a case study, this seminar paper explores the environmental history of insulin as a product derived from slaughtered animals to regulate human metabolism in an age of chronic disease.
Date Range: March 13, 2018
Location: Robert Penn Warren Center for the Humanities, Vanderbilt University
Primary URL: https://my.vanderbilt.edu/sciencestudies/
Primary URL Description: Science and Technology Studies Seminar at Vanderbilt University-Home Page
Secondary URL: https://www.vanderbilt.edu/rpw_center/seminars.php
Secondary URL Description: Warren Center Seminars at Vanderbilt University

“Burdened Bodies: Chemical Exposures, Environmental Inequality, and Alternative Etiologies of Diabetes" (Conference/Institute/Seminar)
Title: “Burdened Bodies: Chemical Exposures, Environmental Inequality, and Alternative Etiologies of Diabetes"
Author: Matthew Klingle
Abstract: After the Second World War, diabetes incidence and prevalence, especially its type 2 variant, increased dramatically in North America and across the globe. By the mid-1950s, biomedical and life scientists along with clinicians began advancing alternative etiologies (causes) to explain the rise. One such etiology centered on the modern industrial chemicals in the environment and their effects on animal and human health: endocrine disruptor chemicals (EDCs) that mimicked or blocked normal hormone functioning, including hormones associated with metabolism such as insulin. This discovery prompted debates over the reliability of longstanding toxicological models to explain exposure and health consequences. Scientific uncertainty also yielded further political challenges to identify, classify, and regulate EDCs. Despite controversies over EDCs and their effects, by the 1980s, environmental justice advocates embraced the “environmental endocrine hypothesis” to clarify health disparities among marginalized communities. This tactic produced new political opportunities to address environmental health injustices but has also generated important questions about using contested scientific information to drive public health inequities. This paper is based on a chapter-in-progress from my book manuscript, "Sweet Blood: Diabetes and the Changing Nature of Modern Health."
Date Range: November 9, 2018
Location: Fishbein Workshop in the History, Philosophy and Sociology of Science, University of Chicago
Primary URL: https://fishbein.uchicago.edu/page/program-information
Primary URL Description: Morris Fishbein Center for the History of Science and Medicine, University of Chicago

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