Free Death Be Not Proud by John J. Gunther

anybody ever met!”
    He was busy, impatient and irritated but not discouraged at not being fully well, and packed with wit. Once he said that for me to lie on the daybed was like being a cigar on a toothpick. I was hungry once and he said, “Give Father three beefsteaks for an afternoon snack—it will help his vitality.” One evening the laundry failed us, and he had to wear a pair of my pajamas. “So, “ he sighed with mock weariness, “the dread day has finally come when I am you.” We continually urged him to rest, and it was a struggle for Frances to get him to bed at a reasonable hour. “I f I hear any more of that talk about not staying up till twelve, I’ll disinherit myself,” he would say. One day he said he had discovered a real reason for the existence of relatives and in-laws—“For surgeons to practice on.” He often joked about his illness. “ I bet that ole’ mustard has knocked the tumor out!”
    But on August 31 there was again a new leak in the bump, and the white blood count was below 1,000. The papilledema was high again, and he seemed to be fading fast.
     
    Meantime we were working on another tack. Not for a moment had we stopped searching. Early in the summer Raymond Swing told me astonishing stories about a doctor named Max Gerson who had achieved remarkable arrestations of cancer and other illnesses by a therapy based on diet. Gerson was, and is, a perfectly authentic M.D., but unorthodox. He had been attacked by the Journal of the American Medical Association and others of the massive vested interests in medicine; Swing himself had been under bitter criticism for a broadcast describing and praising highly Gerson’s philosophy and methods of dietary cure. My own first reaction was skeptical, and Frances was dubious too. Then I learned that Gerson had long experience actually in brain tumor cases, having been associated for years with a famous German neurosurgeon, Foerster, in a tumor clinic at Breslau before the war. I went to see Gerson. He showed me his records of tumors—even gliomas—apparentiy cured. But I was still doubtful because it seemed to me inconceivable that anything so serious as a glioma could be cleared up by anything so simple as a diet. He impressed me greatly as a human being, however. This was a man full of idiosyncrasy but also one who knew much, who had suffered much, and who had a sublime faith in his own ideas. Frances and I had a long talk with Traeger. At first he violently opposed the Gerson claims, but then he swung over on the ground that, after all, Johnny was deteriorating very fast and in any case the diet could do no harm. I stayed at Madison one weekend and Frances went into New York, visited Gerson herself, and looked over his nursing home. She was impressed too. We made a sudden decision over the telephone. We had tried orthodoxy, both static and advanced, and so now we would give heterodoxy a chance. If only we could stave Death off a little longer! And—once more—there was absolutely nothing to lose.
    I took Johnny out to dinner in Madison and broke it to him that we would be going into town the next day for new and further treatment. This was a grievous shock. It was the first time that I saw him seriously upset. He struggled to keep from tears. He flung himself away from me and crept upstairs. Mostly this was because he was midway through preparations for another serious experiment. But by the next morning he was buoyant again—so much so that I dreaded more than I could tell what would have to be the next bad news broken to him, that he could not go back to school. “I’m sorry I bawled last night, Father,” he said with his wonderful radiant smile. Then, limping slightly, he pushed off to his laboratory for a morning’s work, sober and dutiful. School—and the science work he was doing—was practically all he talked about.
    Frances came out, and on September 7 we drove swiftly in to Dr. Gerson’s nursing home. It was a fiercely