​The term diabetes was probably coined by Apollonius of Memphis around 250 BC. Diabetes is first recorded in English, in the form diabete, in a medical text written around 1425. It was in 1675 that Thomas Willis added the word “'mellitus'” to the word diabetes. This was because of the sweet taste of the urine. This sweet taste had been noticed in urine by the ancient Greeks, Chinese, Egyptians, Indians, and Persians as is evident from their literature.

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In 1776, Matthew Dobson confirmed that the sweet taste of urine of diabetics was due to excess of a kind of sugar in the urine and blood of people with diabetes.

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In 1889, ​Joseph von Mering and Oskar Minkowski discovered the role of pancreas in diabetes. 

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In 1910, Sir Edward Albert Sharpey-Schafer found that diabetes resulted from lack of insulin. He termed the chemical regulating blood sugar as insulin from the Latin “insula”, meaning island, in reference to the insulin-producing islets of Langerhans in the pancreas.

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In 1919 Dr. Frederick Allen of the Rockefeller Institute in New York published his “Total Dietary Regulations in the Treatment of Diabetes” that introduced a therapy of strict dieting or starvation treatment – as a way to manage diabetes.

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In 1921 Sir Frederick Grant Banting and Charles Herbert Best repeated the work of Von Mering and Minkowski and went ahead to demonstrate that they could reverse induced diabetes in dogs by giving them an extract from the pancreatic islets of Langerhans of healthy dogs.

Banting, Best, and their chemist colleague Collip purified the hormone insulin from pancreases of cows at the University of Toronto. This led to the availability of an effective treatment for diabetes in 1922. For this, Banting and laboratory director MacLeod received the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine in 1923.​

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In 1922 January, Leonard Thompson, 14, a charity patient at the Toronto General Hospital, became the first person to receive and injection of insulin to treat diabetes. Thompson lived another 13 years before dying of pneumonia at age 27.

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It was in 1936 that Sir Harold Percival (Harry) Himsworth in his published work differentiated type 1 and 2 diabetes as different entities.

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​ Banting was honored by World Diabetes Day which is held on his birthday, November 14 staring 2007.

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Information received from History of Diabetes