Calling of an Angl: Rene Caisse and Essiac Tea--1by Dr. Gary L. Glum
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CHAPTER ONEIn 1922, Rene Caisse was a 33-year-old surgical nurse in Haileybury, Ontario. The physicians and surgeons she assisted, by all accounts, held her in high esteem. She had established an excellent reputation as a nurse. Her family was prominent in the Bracebridge area. Her parents were among the local pioneers who had first settled there in the 1870s when that remote part of Canada was opened up by the lumber and fur trapping industries. Rene's father ran the local barber shop and was active in civic affairs; her mother was active in church affairs. They raised their 12 children to be good Catholics, and Rene-the 8th of 12 remained faithful to the church all her life. The old, fading photographs of the Caisse's and their 12 children posed for portraits show a handsome, well-dressed family. The few photographs that survive of Rene as a young woman in her nursing uniform show her to be trim and strikingly beautiful, dark haired with shining eyes. Those photographs come as a surprise even to people who knew her in the years after she discovered Essiac. At some point early on in those years, she let herself go physically and became terribly overweight, well over 200 pounds, and she stayed that way for the rest of her life. But when she was young, Rene Caisse was a real beauty. One day in 1922, Rene was caring for an old woman who had just come out of surgery. The woman's right breast was badly scarred. Rene asked the woman what had happened to her. As Rene later described the scene, many times over many years and always the same way, the woman told Rene that she had come from England 30 years earlier to join her husband, who was prospecting in northern Ontario. Not long after she arrived in Canada, her right breast had become sore and swollen and painful. An old Indian medicine man at the mining camp had told her that she had cancer and he could cure it with an Indian herbal remedy. He would be happy to give it to her. But instead her husband had taken her to doctors in Toronto. The doctors told her that she was suffering from advanced cancer, and the breast would have to be removed at once. She didn't want the surgery. One of her friends had recently died from the same operation, and they couldn't afford the surgery, anyway, so she decided she'd take her chances with the old Indian. When they got back to the mining camp, the Indian gave the woman an herbal tea to drink and told her the ingredients and how to prepare it so that she could make her own when she needed more. She drank the tea every day for some time and gradually her tumors diminished in size, then disappeared. Her breast was left scarred, but more than 20 years later, she was still free of cancer. She was nearly 80 when she told Rene her story.
"I was much interested," Rene said years later, "and wrote down the names
of the herbs she had used. I knew that doctors threw up their hands when
cancer was discovered in a patient; it was the same as a death sentence,
just about. I decided that if I should ever develop cancer, I would use
this herb tea. "He told me the name of the plant. It was one of the herbs my patient had named as an ingredient of the medicine man's tea." Rene always made it clear that she didn't immediately do anything with the information. She had no way of knowing whether to believe it, and she was busy with her nursing, so she just filed it away in case she might ever need it in the future. The future came suddenly. A few months after she strolled in the garden with the doctor, Rene got word that her mother's only sister had been operated on in Brockville, Ontario. She had cancer of the stomach with a liver involvement. She was given six months to live-at most. Rene: "I hastened to her and talked to her doctor. He was Dr. R.O. Fisher of Toronto, whom I knew well for I'd nursed patients for him many times. I told him about the herb tea and asked his permission to try it under his observation, since there apparently was nothing more medical science could do for my aunt. He consented quickly." Thinking she had nothing to lose, Rene gathered the herbs and brewed the tea. According to Rene's account, her aunt drank the tea for two months, gradually got stronger and eventually recovered. (And lived for another 21 years.) Rene had her first convert in the medical community: Dr. R. O. Fisher. "Dr. Fisher was so impressed that he asked me to use my treatment on some of his other hopeless cancer cases," Rene said years later. Over the next decade, it became common knowledge that Rene and Dr. Fisher were, in fact, treating patients. Those patients showed enough improvement to convince Dr. Fisher that Rene Caisse was on to an important discovery. He became one of her strongest advocates, and, according to Rene, the person who suggested to her that they could achieve even more dramatic results if she would inject the substance hypodermically. Rene later recalled her first injection of a human patient. A man from Lyons, New York, a patient of Dr. Fisher's, had cancer of the throat and tongue. "Dr. Fisher wanted me to inject Essiac into the tongue. Well, I was nearly scared to death. And there was a violent reaction. The patient developed a severe chill; his tongue swelled so badly the doctor had to press it down with a spatula to let him breathe. That lasted about 20 minutes. Then the swelling went down, the chill subsided, and the patient was all right. The cancer stopped growing, the patient went home, and he lived quite comfortably for almost four years." But it was obvious to Rene that she needed to learn a lot more about the herbs before she injected any more patients. At the same time, she still had to earn a living, so she kept her nursing job and put in long days at the hospital. Her nights and weekends she spent in her mother's basement in Toronto, which she had converted into a laboratory, injecting different combinations of the herbs into mice that had been inoculated with human cancers. Rene concluded that one of the herbs reduced the growth of the tumors; the other herbs worked as blood purifiers, cleansing the system of destroyed tissue and infections sloughed off by the malignancies. "I found that the ingredients which stopped the malignancy growth could be given by intramuscular injection in the forearm to destroy the mass of malignant cells, and giving the medicine orally to purify the blood, I got quicker results than when the medicine was all given orally." Meanwhile, word was spreading that this nurse was having success in treating cancer patients with her herbal formula. Some of Dr. Fisher's colleagues began asking Rene to treat their hopeless cases. One of those patients was an 80-year-old man whose face was so ravaged by cancer that his doctors said he couldn't live more than ten days. Rene: "`We will not expect a miracle,' they told me. `But if your treatment can help this man in this stage of cancer, we will know that you have discovered something the whole world needs desperately: My treatment stopped the bleeding in less than 24 hours. The man's face healed. He lived for six months, with very little discomfort."
In 1926, nine licensed Canadian physicians, who had seen the results of
Rene's work, took the unusual and dramatic step of petitioning Canada s
Department of Health and Welfare to allow Rene to conduct large-scale
tests of Essiac. The petition read: We would be interested to see her given an opportunity to prove her work in a large way. To the best of our knowledge she has treated all cases free of any charge and has been carrying on this work over the period of the past two years.
Signed,
But her joy was short-lived. The petition backfired. It became the opening gun in the war over Essiac. The government wasted no time pouncing on this nurse who was practicing medicine. The Department of Health and Welfare immediately dispatched two of their doctors to investigate Rene. Carrying official papers that authorized them to have her arrested-or restrained from practicing without a license-they showed up without warning at her front door. Rene was badly shaken, but she explained to them that she was only treating patients who had been given up-abandoned by their physicians as terminally ill, and she was accepting only voluntary contributions. She made no charge for her services. She showed them her papers, her reports, her letters from physicians. They listened to what she had to say and decided to back off. They told her they were not going to have her arrested, nor were they going to order her to stop doing what she'd been doing. Rene won that battle, but the war was on. For the next fifteen years she lived under siege. As the word of her cancer treatment spread-in largest part by former patients and their friends and families, as well as hundreds of newspaper articles all over Canada-Rene treated dozens, and later hundreds, of patients a month while the doctors and officials who wanted her arrested fought-in parliament, in the press, in the government bureaucracy-with the doctors and officials who believed in her and wanted her left alone to do her work. One of the two doctors first sent by the Department of Health and Welfare in 1926 to investigate and perhaps arrest Rene was Dr. W.C. Arnold. He was so impressed with what he saw that he made arrangements for her to carry on her experiments with mice at the Christie Street Hospital in Toronto, under the supervision of two of the hospital's physicians. (Dr. Arnold, who later became chief physician of the Canadian Pension Board, corresponded with Rene for the next 15 years, writing her long letters of encouragement, giving her advice in her political battles, helping her round up support and-always-trying to persuade her to release the formula to him. ) Looking back many years later on her days in the Christie Street Hospital laboratory, Rene said: "Those mice were inoculated with Rous Sarcoma. I kept them alive 52 days-which was longer than anyone else had been able to do." Physicians continued to send cancer patients to Rene. One of the doctors who signed the petition in 1926 went even further in 1929. He put into writing at great length and in painful detail exactly what happened with one of the cancer patients he referred to Rene Caisse. The two-page, single-spaced letter, dated March 22, 1929, and signed by Dr. J.A. McInnis, tells the story of a 55-year-old woman identified only as Mrs. DeCarle. She first visited him, he wrote, in late 1928. She was suffering severe abdominal pains. He examined her and found a tumor in her upper abdomen. "This tumor was hard and nodular to the touch. There was also another mass which could be distinctly palpated in the region of the uterus." Dr. McInnis then wrote: "From the history of her case , symptoms and physical examination, I had no hesitation in arriving at a diagnosis of carcinoma." Later he was informed by Mrs. DeCarle's family that she had been under the care of two specialists in Brockville who believed that the condition was malignant and that Mrs. DeCarle had only several months to live. "As this case was inoperable," Dr. McInnis stated, "any treatment given her could only be of a palliative nature and we began to administer Miss Caisse s treatment for cancer on December 3rd. The medicine was in liquid form and given orally, twice daily. After the first ten days treatment, quite an improvement was observed, both in the patient's condition generally and in connection with the two tumors I have described, in regard to size and consistency. The abdomen was less rigid, her appetite was improved and the discomfort and pain after eating was considerably lessened." In his examinations of Mrs. DeCarle over the next several weeks, Dr. McInnis stated, he found that the tumors in her abdomen and her pelvis were becoming smaller, and the nodular condition of the growths was disappearing. "In addition, the general health and condition of the patient improved wonderfully. Each week she felt better and was able to remain up for the greater part of the day, could eat well, pain and discomfort had disappeared and she began occupying herself with house work, besides which, she was gaining in weight." Mrs. DeCarle was treated until March 1st, "when her general condition of health appeared normal. The growth in the upper abdomen reduced, at least, by more than two thirds of its former size, the nodular condition entirely disappeared, and what remained would appear to be only adhesions from rolled up omentum. The tumor in the pelvis was scarcely palpable at all." Dr. McInnis then described Mrs. DeCarle as looking "in normal health." She had told him she was feeling as well as she ever did, and she had gained 20 pounds. "Altogether, I would say that the treatment has brought about a remarkable transformation. Whether the results so far obtained from Miss Caisse's treatment will be permanent, remains to be seen. I am of the opinion that these results are conclusive." Dr. McInnis noted that no X-ray had been taken before the treatment was begun, and no X-ray had been taken since the end of the treatment. But: "At the time the gastric series were made, films indicated the presence of the two masses I have described and were strongly indicative of carcinoma." He concluded: "I desire to state that the results of Miss Caisse's treatment have been decidedly remarkable and I have no hesitation in making the statement that this treatment has reduced the growths to a minimum, has entirely relieved pain and has apparently restored the patient to normal health." Even physicians whose skepticism initially bordered on hostility were being won over by what they saw A typical example is Dr. J. Masson Smith of Beaverton, Ontario. On February 23, 1932, he addressed a curt "Dear Madam" letter to Rene informing her, in the briefest possible terms, that Mr. E Maxwell appeared to have "malignant disease in his Pancreas." Dr. Smith listed the symptoms-loss of appetite, loss of 20 pounds, extreme weakness-and said that Mr. Maxwell "wishes to undertake your treatment." The doctor reluctantly offered no objections. Five weeks later, on March 30, 1932, Dr. Smith wrote a second letter to Rene. This time he couldn't have been friendlier-and it was obvious how impressed he was. "Mr. E Maxwell came to my office Sunday last," Dr. Smith wrote. "Frankly, I was delighted to see such a marked improvement in his general health. "He has gained seven and a half pounds. His hemoglobin estimated ninety percent. He moves with a great deal more vigor and mentally he is very much brighter and alert. "I would be interested to know something more definite of your treatment. With what particular conditions do you use it and what do you claim for it? Over what period of time do you believe it should be used? I will watch Mr. Maxwell's progress with a great deal of interest." (Mr. Maxwell's progress, as it turned out, was very good. In Rene Caisse's files is a letter from him, dated five years later, in which he says his brother is now sick and asks if Rene would please treat him. "He knows just as much and more than I do what you did for me," Mr. Maxwell wrote in 1937.) With results like that, Rene s life was going through a complete upheaval. As many as 30 patients a day were showing up at her apartment for treatment. She decided she had to give up her nursing job to be able to devote full-time to her patients, and since she wasn't allowed to charge for her services, she was now dependent upon whatever voluntary contributions came her way. The neighbors in her apartment building in Toronto objected to the constant stream of people into and out of Rene's apartment at all hours, so she was forced to move to Peterborough, east of Toronto. But she used to joke with friends that she would have had to move sooner or later anyway, because once she quit nursing to treat patients she couldn't afford the rent in Toronto. Shortly after she moved to Peterborough, a health officer showed up at her door one morning at 8 a.m., saying that he had a warrant to arrest her for malpractice. As upset as she was, Rene calmly sat the official down, told him her whole story, showed him what she was doing and won him over. Instead of arresting her, he returned to his boss, Dr. R.J. Noble, registrar of the Canadian College of Physicians and Surgeons, to explain the situation to him. Once again, Rene had talked her way out of the threat of a jail cell. But she was frantic. This was already the second time she'd come within an unsympathetic ear of being arrested. So she organized her own counterattack. She took five friendly doctors and 12 of her patients to the office of the Minister of Health, Dr. Robb. Dr. Robb heard them out and promised Rene that she wouldn't be arrested-for the time being-if she continued to accept only patients who had a written diagnosis of cancer from their doctors-and if she made no charge. That was fine with Rene. "The look of gratitude I saw in my patients' eyes when relief from pain was accomplished," she wrote years later, "and the hope and cheerfulness that returned when they saw their malignancies reducing was pay enough for all my efforts." In 1932, the Toronto Star published the first major newspaper article about Rene Caisse and Essiac. The headline read: "Bracebridge Girl Makes Notable Discovery Against Cancer." The story was now out in front of the public. Rene was 44 years old, badly overweight, under heavy stress carrying her patient load, and on her feet all day and half the night in the kitchen of her apartment cooking up Essiac.
Now she was going to be facing the additional pressures of becoming a
sought after public figure and the center of a major political battle in
the Canadian parliament. The battle would build in Canada for the rest of
the 1930s, and what Rene went through would have destroyed someone with
less determination and stamina. Introduction I 1 I 2 I 3 I 4I 5 I 6 I 7 I 8 I 9 I 10 I 11 I 12 I 13 I 14 All of the events and characters depicted in this book are non-fictional
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