Sugar-Sick Yet Healthy: Changing Concepts of Disease in the Dutch Diabetics Association (1945-1970)

Using the journal of the Dutch Diabetics Association (Nederlandse Vereniging
van Suikerzieken), the article provides insight into the role of an early patient organisation in
conceptualising the chronic disease diabetes and its management in the Netherlands between
1945 and 1970. The dual aims of discipline (steered by health professionals) and independence
(steered by diabetics) were reconciled through the concept of balance during the 1940s and 1950s.
Organised diabetics played a particularly large role, and independence got particular emphasis as a
consequence. This made it possible for organised patients to reconfigure their disease and identity
in terms of social health in relation to labour, family and society in the post-war reconstruction
period. In the late 1960s, this social concept transformed into a personal concept of health in which
the concept of balance lost its prominence, despite a short intermezzo of medicalisation in the early
1960s.