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| Ernesto Roma | |
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Ernesto Roma  Dr. Ernesto Roma was born in 1886 and studied at the Lisbon Military College. He graduated in Medicine at the Lisbon Medical School with high marks. After graduating, he visited the Clinic of Dieulafoy in Paris, one of the most famous at that time.
In 1921 he "discovered America", as he used to say. In 1922 he was in Boston in the Massachussets General Hospital, where he witnessed the "insulin revolution" and visited the Joslin Clinic, a centre where the discoverers of insulin had sent the first few vials of the product. On his return to Portugal he was immediately acknowledged as an expert diabelotogist and many diabetics converged on his clinic. In 1926, frustrated by deaths in poor diabetics who had no means of acquiring insulin, he mobilised wealthy diabetics into creating the Portuguese Association, the first in the world. After founding the Association, he immediately introduced diabetic education as a vital means of allowing diabetics to perform their self-monitoring, self-injections and encouraging an adequate diet. He thus reintroduced the concept of diabetes education to Europe; initiated in the middle of the 19th century by Bouchardat, then half forgotten in Europe, it had been continued in America, in Boston, by Elliot Joslin. Dr. Roma adapted the Association´s clinic to the conditions of the poor in Portugal, allowing a relatively free diet once diabetics had started insulin, so that they could eat the same as their families and avoid complicated weighing and calculations. Self-monitoring and foot-care were also important items. He never gave up his studies in several fields of diabetology and maintained the only diabetes training school for nurses and doctors for several decades. In 1979, just after Dr. Roma´s death, Jean-Philippe Assal, the creator of the Diabetes Education Study Group of the EASD, asked the Association to present its half century´s experience at an international meeting on diabetes education held in Geneva. He thus wished to acknowledge Ernesto Roma´s importance in the history of European Diabetology. |
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