Evan Saunders
Marjorie Foy
HIS-217-01
September 12, 2015
Impact of Medical, Economic, and Social Changes
On Mortality Rates from 1900-1940
People often talk of how World War I and World War II had a lasting effect on
advancements in the fields of science, but far too often do historians skip over the
importance of certain specifics such as mortality rate and how it changed due to medical,
economic, and social changes during an era of turmoil.
Throughout the early 20th century, scientists were discovering and exploring new
ways to treat diseases that were becoming more and more common as each year
progressed. The first forty years of the 20th century provided for the development of
vaccines for diseases such as whooping cough, tetanus, and then what became two of the
most important discoveries of all, the vaccine for diabetes and tuberculosis. These two,
being some of the lead causes of low mortality rates in the 20th century, were issues that
when solved would increase mortality rates and overall life expectancy. The discovery of
a vaccine for insulin was a process full of failure and unexpected issues such as the
inability to mass-produce the vaccine, and an ongoing process of actually trying to form
the most pure form of insulin one could possibly make and give to human test subjects.
The entire idea of being able to isolate the pancreas and learn of what functions the
pancreas serves to complete was first explored by Oskar Minkowski in the early 1900s.
Minkowski discovered that the pancreas aids in digestion of food and produces the
hormone that regulates blood sugar, and once this information could be utilized,
dieticians and doctors started producing diets to try and limit the amount of calories that
someone with diabetes could consume in a day. With that came plenty of issues, mainly
that being of starvation, which obviously did not contribute well to the overall mortality
rate and life expectancy of the era. After the realization that starvation was not a solution,
research in to another solution to low mortality rates became necessary, even when all
resources and money had been depleted. Trying to find new approaches to research for a
vaccine for diabetes came in fast manner, with a Canadian team taking over using dogs
pancreas to isolate a form of insulin. With this, trouble came with mass-producing the
