[History of the rhenish and alsacian contributions to the understanding of diabetes].

The history of diabetes mellitus is punctuated from the Egyptian Antiquity by sometimes amazingly acute clinical observations and inversely several missed opportunities on the way of the discovery of the mechanisms of the disease and of the development of its therapies.Alsace, and more generally the Rhine countries, have played a major role in this adventure, of which a crucial step has been the experimental demonstration of the role of the pancrease in the pathogenis of the disease by Oskar Minkowski and Joseph von Mering in Strasbourg in 1889.