The Indian Health Service recorded just eleven deaths attributed to the disease among the entire Native American population of the state in the six years leading up to Joslin’s arrival. Sage Memorial Hospital on the Navajo Reservation, a private institution, reported just a single case of diabetes between 1931 and 1936 (although, as Joslin pointed out, only seventy-five of the patients were past the age of fifty). As late as 1947, a survey of the inpatient records of twenty-five thousand Navajo admitted to the same hospital produced a total of only five cases in sixteen years.
