Frederick Allen

Education

Born in Iowa, he later studied medicine in California.

Career

He was employed in a poorly paid position at Harvard University, before working in New Jersey and in Boston, Massachusetts, around 1919. Diabetes captured his interest. He discovered that a reduction of food intake, especially carbohydrates, reduced or eliminated glycosuria, the principal clinically measurable manifestation of diabetes at that time.

This improved some of the complications of diabetes in some of his patients, especially overweight adults.

At that time, though doctors recognized differences in course and prognosis of patients with juvenile and adult-onset forms of diabetes, treatments were few and typically tried with patients of all ages. Allen opened the Physiatric Institute in Morristown, New Jersey, the world"s first clinic for sufferers of diabetes mellitus, on April 26, 1921.

By 1929, Allen had opened facilities in Rye, New York and was opening a new location on 57th Street in Midtown Manhattan. Elizabeth Hughes Gossett, daughter of United States. Supreme Court Justice Charles Evans Hughes, was kept alive with Allen"s techniques until she became one of the first patients treated with insulin when it became available as a therapy.

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 typically prolong life by more than a few months. 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 British Columbia, 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. 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.

Achievements

• 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".