St Marks Fair: The Laxy Fair: The Southern Agricultural Show: The Northern Agricultural Show: St Andrews Fair: As many coffee mornings and car boot sales as we can possibly organise.

To this end Jan would like through the newsletter to inform you all, that she needs help with prizes for the stalls for these events. She asks for anything you may not require that you might like to donate to the Group.

Many Thanks.

Membership

The Membership Secretary of the Friends of the Manx Diabetes Centre would like to take this opportunity to remind those members who are members on a yearly basis, whose membership may be about to expire to please renew your membership at the appropriate time.

Remember that your membership expires after a full calendar year.

All you have to do is look at your yellow membership card and you will see the expiry date so we will not send out reminders, we trust you implicitly.

Please all communications to the Membership Scretary at 39 Cronk Drean Douglas .

If you require any further Information please ring the membership secretary on (01624) 613702

Many thanks look forward to hearing from you.

Enclosed is a membership form which we once again ask all members and friends who are already members of the Friends of the Manx Diabetes Centre to pass on to their friends.

If you are not a member when you receive this please join us.

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Budding Journalists

We have asked for anyone who wanted to bring to the notice of our members any material that they may want to impart.

We are pleased to print the thoughts of John Collins which we hope you will find interesting.

“I hope to be able to bring you snippets of information in this and subsequent Newsletters that you may or may not know and find interesting.

Prior to the discovery of insulin, any diabetic who went into a coma, the coma was always fatal.

So the discovery of insulin was without question one of the major medical and scientific triumphs of the last century.

Diabetes has been known to physicians for thousand of years. One of the first references to it being the Ebers Papyrus written in Egypt in fifteen thousand BC. This is one of the earliest documents describing the treatment of diabetes. The treatment was called, “A medicine to drive away the passage of too much urine”. What's more the Papyrus gives a remedy for diabetes, which claims that what is required is a mixture of bones, wheat grains, fresh grits, green lead, earth and water. This ingredients, the Papyrus claims, the user should “let strand moist then strain it and take it for four days”.The Egyptians don't say whether it worked or not. The Egyptians were not the only ones to have diagnosed diabetes. Reference is also made in ancient Indian, Roman, Japanese and Chinese writings.