As an undergraduate at Yale, Matthew C. Riddle majored in English literature. “A stop along the way,” he says. “I knew I was going to medical school.” He graduated magna cum laude and spent his junior and senior years in an honors program that allowed him to craft his own reading project. He chose turn-of-the-century authors: Thomas Hardy, James Joyce, George Eliot, T.S. Eliot, and, his favorite, Thomas Mann. “It was a period of transition,” Riddle says. “Monarchies were falling away, religion as the center of life was in decline, and literature, itself, was in transition as a way to reflect those other forces.”
By the time Riddle earned his medical degree from Harvard in 1964, the field of diabetes research, too, was about to experience a sea change.
“It was a world of optimistic science, with a number of big advances. The discovery of an insulin assay in blood, for example, really cracked open some questions. There was a rapid rate of progress in treatments available,” Riddle says. “The science that underlies present treatment of diabetes was happening in the ‘60s and ‘70s.”
It is said that reading fiction increases a reader’s empathy. Riddle’s background in English has cropped up in surprising ways throughout his career. After completing his internship and residency in internal medicine at Rush-Presbyterian-St. Luke’s Medical Center in Chicago, he completed two endocrinology fellowships, one under Ted Schwartz, the other under Robert Williams. He was interested in research, and Riddle found himself drawn to diabetes because it also required an empathetic understanding of people.
“You can’t address diabetes without knowledge of both the science and the people involved,” he says. “I liked that behavioral component. Meeting people, working with them—it’s a rich experience.”
Since those early days, Riddle has spent his entire professional career at a single medical school, Oregon Health and Science University (OHSU), in his native Portland, where he is emeritus professor of medicine. During this time, his research has focused on the use of basal insulin for management of type 2 diabetes, the use of glucose-lowering agents in combination, and the design and management of large clinical trials. He also built OHSU’s diabetes program from the ground up.
“I was the first full-time faculty member at our medical school to focus on diabetes. This was 1973,” he says.
“I was interested in the application of scientific progress for patient care, and that’s hard to do unless you have a structure that allows that. It was my goal to create a diabetes center to provide that structure.”
Today, the Harold Schnitzer Diabetes Health Center is the premier clinic in the Pacific Northwest for both children and adults with diabetes.
Over the last few years, Riddle has managed to combine his interest in literature and medicine. He is currently an ad hoc editor with Diabetes Care, but between 2017 and 2022, he served as the journal’s editor in chief. One part of the job is choosing studies with the latest science, but a major requirement for any scientific journal is the editing, the fine-tuning of an article’s language.
“The editor’s job is to pick the best work, ensure that it’s properly reviewed by impartial reviewers, and then improved. There’s always room for improvement, room to revise a manuscript so the best possible version comes out.”
“It was a wonderful experience,” he adds, “doing something I was familiar with from my past life.”