The first hospital blood glucose monitoring system for pre-meal testing was developed under Joslin's direction before 1940 and was the forerunner of the modern glucometer era. Joslin was also the first to name diabetes a serious public health issue. Just after WWII, he expressed concern to the Surgeon General of the U.S. Public Health Service that diabetes was an epidemic, and challenged the government to do a study in his hometown, Oxford, Massachusetts. The study was started in 1946 and soon confirmed the true incidence of diabetes in the general population (including a percentage of cases that went undetected). The study was carried out over the next 20 years. The results would later confirm Joslin's fear that the incidence of diabetes in the United States was approaching epidemic proportions. He has been named as being, with Frederick Madison Allen, one of the two leading diabetologists from the period between 1910 and 1920.