My grandfather was 12 in 1912. At that time, schoolkids worked half a day in the mill and had half a day at school, until they were 14, when they worked full time. The shift alternated, one week it would be school first, and then the mill and the following week it was the other way around.
He'd get up at 4.30 get washed and walk with his Dad to the pub where he and his mates all had breakfast, coffee, pickled eggs, ham sandwiches, beer etc. The mill horn would go and they'd all start work at 6am. One of the young lad's duties was to take the milk churn to the pub and get it filled with beer for the cotton workers to drink, a practice which was stopped by Lloyd George, in 1916. Grandad finished at 12 midday and had to start school at 1pm. The teacher said he "felt sorry for the poor buggers, they're all dead beat". After school, he walk 2 miles to the allotments north of Manchester and get the cart and donkey ready and set off on his round, collecting the potato peelings from the fish and chip shops which were to be used for feeding the pigs back at the allotment. When he got back, he had to tend to the donkey, put the car away and then light a fire to boil up the potato peelings to sterilise them. When they were cool, he could feed the pigs. Then he'd walk the two miles back home and have something to eat and go to bed.
My wife's grandfather used to tell how he would walk, with his friends, over the moors from Huddersfield to Oldham, along with a couple of thousand of others, to watch the football match. Then they'd all walk back. An old bloke I knew used to tell me that, as a lad, hee would accompany his mother as they walked from a village near Barnsley, every Saturday, to Huddersfield, because they had better shops there. They spent the day shopping and then carried all the bags back. People simply required more food for energy in those days.
Here's a clip of a different, but similar, mill scene from 1900.
Page 147 is interesting as it quite happily advocates a 40g per day regime! Remember at the time the book was written it would have been the diet for T1 & T2 as insulin therapy wasn't invented until the mid 1920's
.
It didn't work though for T1s nor for a lot of the possible T2s. Remember they will not have been diagnosed at the early point they are today and indeed even when they were diagnosed the monitoring was mostly through glucose in the urine , normally only present if the level is above about 10mmol/l
In an attempt to get improved results, Frederick Allen introduced the starvation diet "We literally starved the child and adult with the faint hope that something new in treatment would appear...It was no fun to starve a child to let him live" Elliott Joslin , A few lucky ones did survive until insulin was introduced but not many. Some died as a result of inanition, a synonym for starvation.
Here's how they did it, complete with recipes.
THE
STARVATION TREATMENT
OF DIABETES
With a Series of Graduated Diets
used at the
MASSACHUSETTS GENERAL HOSPITAL
http://www.gutenberg.org/files/26058/26058-h/26058-h.htm
The short term case studies for the adults look quite promising in this book, the children less so. The longer term figures, so far as they are available continue to show high mortality rates.
Why were "starvation diets" promoted for diabetes in the pre-insulin period?
Allan Mazur
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3062586/#!po=64.8148
Clinical Diabetes Mellitus: A Problem-oriented ApproachVarious dietary schools developed and by the beginning of the 20th century their respective adherents were embroiled in heated controversies reflecting their dogmatism, contradiction and confusion. Naunyn, championed carbohydrate-free diets, while those on the other extreme championed high-carbohydrate diets variously consisting of milk, oatmeal and other cereals and potatoes……..
By the early part of the 20th century, diet partisanship was so intense that some physicians were arguing about the relative merits of different oatmeal and the various ways of cooking them
My father was born in 1922 and diagnosed T1 sometime pre 1939 (he couldn't serve in the forces) but he hid his condition and worked as a face worker in the coal mines till about 1965. He worked very hard on a 3 shift pattern.
I distinctly remember food, in our house, being referred to as 'Greens, Reds and Blacks' , he had the same sorts of quantities every day. He regarded it as a huge breakthrough that gave him back his life, when he was able to have only 1 injection a day. We never had desserts, when my brother was also diagnosed T1 at 14 I wasn't even allowed sweets as a treat. When bg machines came in he kept his blood sugar very tight, he went on long walks and had a static bicycle in inclement weather. Prior to that he kept his urine glucose at 'green precip' - don't know what that meant, but I remember it well, I was intrigued with it as a child, like a chemistry set.
He lived to the grand old age of 86, diabetes got him in the end. He was on a coach trip to Blackpool, in his 80s, when he fell asleep. He was a widow by then. Nobody thought it was a problem, an elderly gentleman having a nap, but when they tried to wake him he was in a hypo. The ambulance was sent for, glucagon dispensed, but, typically, he refused to go to A&E and set off running to catch his pals. He had a Cardiac Arrest outside Blackpool Pleasure Beach, the First Aiders got him back but the Anoxia robbed him of his memory and his independence. Managing his diabetes became a nightmare, he couldn't remember injecting and left alone would repeatedly inject himself. He lost all perspective of time, if he woke up at 3am he would start cooking bacon and eggs. With 3 teenage children, the first about to go to Uni and needing financial support, and a full time job, there was no alternative but him to go into care, where he was fed pizza and chips, pies, pasties, desserts. He developed 'diabetic side effects' remarkably quickly - he had none whatsoever before.
His health rapidly deteriorated, I think, in the end, his GP decided not to treat him / admit him for a hypo. I didn't challenge it at the time because his quality of life was simply dreadful and he would not have thanked me for dragging him back to life. But he had a good 80 years, 63 of them diabetic and with no short term memory the realities of his day to day life for the last couple of years distressed him less than me.
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