n>The year was 1870. Josef Seegen had been seeing patients at the Carlsbad baths in Bohemia since the summer of 1854, tending primarily to individuals who suffered from diabetes. Over the years, he had become convinced that drinking and bathing in the spa’s mineral waters were helping his patients assimilate carbohydrates and thereby reduce the glucose that passed into their urine. What he could not figure out was why over 25% of the more than 200 patients he had seen in the previous 15 years were Jewish. “This percentage is immense,” he declared, even if Jews tended to visit spas more frequently than Christians. In a book he published on diabetes in 1893, he commented that 10% would have been unusual enough, given that Jews constituted just over 2% of the overall population in Europe. That they comprised one-quarter of his patients suggested that something unusual was going on. Read Full Article »