It is truly gratifying to me to be able now to add that many other of the most exalted members of the Faculty have honoured my movement in the question with their approbation.
I consider it a public duty further to state, that Mr. Harvey, whom I have named on the 24th page as my kind medical adviser in the cure of Corpulence, is not Dr. John Harvey, who has published a Pamphlet on Corpulence assimilating with some of the features and the general aspect of mine, and which has been considered (as I learn from correspondents who have obtained it) the work of my medical friend. It is not.
I am glad, therefore, to repeat that my medical adviser was, and is still, Mr. William Harvey, F.R.C.S., No. 2, Soho Square, London, W.
WILLIAM BANTING.
April, 1864.
MR. HARVEY’S REMARKS.
“My patient, Mr. Banting, having published for the benefit of his fellow sufferers, some account of the diet which I recommended him to adopt with a view to relieve him of a distressing degree of hypertrophy of the adipose tissue. I have been frequently urged by him to explain the principles upon which I was enabled to treat with success this inconvenient, and in some instances, distressing condition of the system.
“The simple history of my finding occasion to investigate this subject is as follows:—When in Paris, in the year 1856, I took the opportunity of attending a discussion on the views of M. Bernard, who was at that time propounding his now generally admitted theory of the liver functions. After he had discovered by chemical processes and physiological experiments, which it is unnecessary for me to recapitulate here, that the liver not only secreted bile, but also a peculiar amyloid or starch-like product which he called glucose, and which in its chemical and physical properties appeared to be nearly allied to saccharine matter, he further found that this glucose could be directly produced in the liver by the ingestion of sugar and its ally starch, and that in diabetes it existed there in considerable excess. It had long been well known that a purely animal diet greatly assisted in checking the secretion of diabetic urine; and it seemed to follow, as a matter of course, that the total abstinence from saccharine and farinaceous matter must drain the liver of this excessive amount of glucose, and thus arrest in a similar proportion the diabetic tendency. Reflecting on this chain of argument, and knowing too that a saccharine and farinaceous diet is used to fatten certain animals, and that in diabetes, the whole of the fat of the body rapidly disappears, it occurred to me that excessive obesity might be allied to diabetes as to its cause, although widely diverse in its development: and that if a purely animal diet was useful in the latter disease, a combination of animal food with such vegetable matters as contained neither sugar nor starch, might serve to arrest the undue formation of fat. I soon afterwards had an opportunity of testing this idea. A dispensary patient, who consulted me for deafness, and who was enormously corpulent, I found to have no distinguishable disease of the ear. I therefore suspected that his deafness arose from the great development of adipose matter in the throat, pressing upon and stopping up the eustachian tubes. I subjected him to a strict non-farinaceous and non-saccharine diet, and treated him with the volatile alkali alluded to in his Pamphlet, and occasional aperients, and in about seven months he was reduced to almost normal proportions, his hearing restored, and his general health immensely improved. This case seemed to give substance and reality to my conjectures, which further experience has confirmed.