Rollin Turner "Woody" Woodyatt (3 June 1878 – 17 December 1953)[1] was an American physician, known for his contribution to the field of diabetes and other metabolic diseases.
[6] Frederick Banting and Charles Best's successful isolation in July 1921 of insulin from canine islets of Langerhans changed the direction of Woodyatt's research in diabetology.
[2]During the trial of Leopold and Loeb in 1924, Woodyatt, as an expert on endocrinology, testified as a witness for the state of Illinois against the defense led by Clarence Darrow.
[11] In 1934 the Chicago physician R.T. Woodyatt suggested that ‘The history of diabetes has been marked by recurrence of certain ideas which decline and disappear; only to go through a similar cycle again in an altered form in a new generation’.
He never wrote a paper on the subject but contemporaries understood it to refer to excessive fluctuations of blood sugar which could not be explained by patient or physician errors; the cardinal feature was unpredictability and unexpected hypoglycaemic reactions.
Did proponents of the organic school have patients (unreported) in whom lability had an obvious emotional cause or, conversely, were the psychosocial problems which the psychiatrists unearthed a consequence rather than a cause of the instability?
"[14] Arthur P. Thomson published in 1924 his findings concerning the Woodyatt formula as it pertained to diabetic patients undergoing dietary treatments in the pre-insulin era.