Dr. Max Gerson
Born in 1881 in Wongrowitz, Germany, Max Gerson studied medicine in three leading German universities and graduated at the University of Freiburg. As a young physician he frequently suffered from debilitating migraine headaches, which forced him to spend days bedridden in a darkened room, unable to work. Since none of the medical experts he consulted were able to help him, he began to experiment with various diets, to see whether his problem might have a nutritional cause. After several failures he found that a salt-free, low fat vegetarian diet freed him from his migraines and nausea.
He began to prescribe his „migraine diet" to fellow sufferers among his patients, all of whom reported great improvements. One of them told Dr Gerson that not only had his migraines ceased, his lupus vulgaris - skin tuberculosis - was also beginning to heal. „Impossible," Dr Gerson replied. „lupus is incurable." Yet, clearly, the patient's lesions were healing. The young physician was baffled: how could a diet specifically designed as a cure for migraine also affect a totally different disease? This contradicted all that he had been taught by his eminent teachers. Eventually he was forced to acknowledge that what his diet was curing was not a specific condition but the entire organism, which then became able to get rid of all its ills. This insight was the foundation on which Dr Gerson eventually built his nutrition-based therapy.
After successfully treating a large number of lung tuberculosis cases with his „migraine diet", Dr Gerson reluctantly agreed to treat an insistent woman cancer patient by dietary means - and achieved a cure. Early successes were followed by some failures, which prompted him to explore the cancer problem with the scientific rigour and painstaking clinical observation that characterized his work. Before World War II he and his family moved to the United States, where he passed the necessary examinations that enabled him to practise medicine in New York State.
Over the next twenty years, having developed and refined his therapy, he was able to cure a large number of cancer patients, including many terminal cases sent home to die by their doctors. His success and the unusual nature of his treatment attracted great hostility from the American medical establishment, which hampered and frustrated his efforts to publish his results and make his method public. Eventually he felt obliged to write a book, A Cancer Therapy - Results of Fifty Cases, in order to provide a lasting record of his life's work.. That book, first published in 1958 and kept in print ever since, has become a classic, presenting a revolutionary alternative approach to cancer and other chronic degenerative diseases.
Dr Gerson died in 1959. Nobel Laureate Dr Albert Schweitzer, whom - aged 75 -he had cured of advanced diabetes mellitus, wrote this about his old friend:
"I see in Dr Gerson one of the most eminent medical geniuses in the history of medicine. Many of his basic ideas have been adopted without having his name connected with them. He leaves a legacy which commands attention and which will assure him his due place. Those he cured will now attest to the truth of his ideas."