Disgusting as that may sound, if you were a doctor back in the old days, you’d be a pee connoisseur. As a matter of routine, you would collect your patients’ “liquid gold” to examine its taste, color, smell, and consistency. Much of what doctors discerned from urine was nonsense, but an exception was its sweetness. The English physician Thomas Willis (1621–1675) coined the term “diabetes mellitus” (Latin for “honey sweetened”), what we now call diabetes, from urine that was “wonderfully sweet as if it were imbued with honey or sugar.”14
