With insuline emerged the diabetic
Before insulin treatment, the life expectancy after the onset of diabetes was a few years at most. The younger the patient, the faster they would die, usually through going into a coma. Special diets could somewhat prolong life, but with or without treatment diabetes was always fatal and most often both debilitating and humiliating.
Then, with the introduction of insulin in the 1920’s, the disease was profoundly transformed from acute to chronic and from one set of experiences to another. Not only did the disease itself change, but an entirely new person emerged: the diabetic. Previously, the number of people suffering from diabetes at any given time was kept relatively low by the fact that anyone who got sick soon succumbed to the illness. As people could now continue to live for decades, the patient population grew quickly. They formed clubs and associations across Europe and beyond, which published newsletters, wrote petitions, arranged summer camps and cooking classes, all in the interest of making this newly possible life with diabetes easier, even fun. In doing so, they shaped not only the new type of person that was the diabetic, but also created a mold for life with chronic illness.
In her ongoing research, she is studying how patient organizations affected 20th century illness concepts. One case study is the Swedish Diabetes Association, formed in 1943.
In her talk, she will present how this association, in close connection with the government, set out to delineate the diabetic, her characteristics, needs, and interests and how this contributed to shaping the role of medicine in the 20th century.
Short biography on Ylva Söderfeldt
Associate Professor Ylva Söderfeldt works at Uppsala University in Sweden. Ylvas primary research interests are directed towards the relationship between expertise and subjectivity, i. e. between those who produce knowledge and the ones they produce knowledge about. This has led her to study people who, due to some deviation from the norm, become objects of concern for various kinds of experts who study, describe, manage, and treat them in various ways. Specifically, she is interested in how groups marked as “others” participate in defining themselves and how this process that affects both the “others” and the people, practices, institutions, and discourses surrounding them.
Registration
If you want to watch/listen to this SHEtalk on Zoom, please register here.
What are SHEtalks
SHEtalks are a serial of informal research seminars held at Center for Sustainable Healthcare Education, University of Oslo. SHEtalks are research lunch lectures. The fall 2023 program was put together by researcher Gabriela Saldanha. Seminars take place at Thursdays at noon (GTM+1) unless otherwise specified. They may be delivered and attended in person or via zoom.