Emaciation is frequently a marked symptom of diabetes, and one which it is most important to check. A weighing machine should form part of the furniture of the bedroom of a diabetic, and he should be weighed at regular intervals, and the record kept. By depriving the patient of all starch and sugar in his diet, which, as we have shown in the earlier chapters, are the foods out of which much of the fat of the body is manufactured, and by his wasteful excretion of sugar, the body naturally emaciates. It becomes, therefore, of the greatest possible importance when framing his dietary not only to exclude starch and sugar, but to compensate for this exclusion by giving an excess of fatty foods. The influence of these must be noted by means of the weighing machine.

We thus see that it is not only necessary to diet a diabetic patient, but closely and carefully to watch the effect of this diet on him, by ascertaining and recording its influence on the specific gravity and the amount of urine daily secreted, and on his loss or gain of flesh.