Diabetes, Tennessee: The state is home to patients, care and research
October 18, 2010 by Devin Greaney · 1 Comment
John Anderson is shown in this April, 1979 photo wearing the prototype diabetes insulin pump. Photo Courtesy University of Memphis Libraries, Special Collections. Memphis Press-Scimitar archives. Photo by Saul Brown
Spring Hill native General Nathan Bedford Forrest was the real life version of the movie character “Machete.”
He had thirty horses shot out from under him. He killed thirty one men in hand to hand combat. He survived a point-blank shot from one of his men who he then stabbed to death saying “No damn man kills me and lives!” Union General William Sherman said he should be captured or killed “even if it takes ten thousand men and bankrupts the treasury.” He made it through the 1873 Memphis yellow fever epidemic which at the time was the worst the city had seen.
But his death finally came not from a Yankee bullet, sword or cannonball, but from something many Tennesseans of today can relate – diabetes.
