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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.