Free Death Be Not Proud by John J. Gunther Page B

happened, was an acquaintance of mine of twenty years’ standing whom I altogether trusted. I did not know whether or not Gerson could cure, or even check, a malignant glioblastoma. I did learn beyond reasonable doubt that his diet did effect other cures. Gerson himself, zealot that he is, has never claimed that his diet will “cure anything,” as his enemies sometimes charge. But some of his results have been astonishing.
    One of our doctors (hostile to Gerson at first) said one evening that September, “I f this thing works, we can chuck millions of dollars’ worth of equipment in the river, and get rid of cancer by cooking carrots in a pot.”
    The regime was certainly onerous. Johnny said wearily after the first week, “ I even tell time by enemas.”
    This is what Johnny had to eat during the next months. For breakfast, a pint of fruit juice, oatmeal, an apple-carrot mash, and a special soup made of fresh vegetables—parsley root, celery knob, leek, tomatoes. This soup he continued to take at intervals during the day, until he had a quart or a quart and a half. For lunch, heaping portions of cooked vegetables, a salad, fresh fruit, the soup and mash, and a baked potato. For dinner, the same. Later he was permitted pot cheese, skimmed milk, and dry pumpernickel. Nothing canned. Nothing seasoned, smoked, or frozen. Above all nothing salted. No meat, eggs, or fish. No cream, butter, or other fats. No sugar except honey and maple sugar. No candy, sausages, ice cream, pickles, spices, preserved foods, white flour, condiments, cakes, or any of the multitude of small things a child loves. Very little water. All the vegetables had to be cooked with no added water or steam, after being washed, not scraped, and without using pressure cookers or anything with aluminum, and the fruits had to be squeezed in a nonmetallic squeezer. Back to nature!
    Do not think this was starvation. Some patients gain rather than lose on the Gerson diet. The meals are enormous in size and, as Mrs. Seeley prepared them, exquisitely com-posed. Then to compensate for the lack of minerals there are injections of crude liver extract every day, and multitudinous pills. These were assembled in a glass dish every morning, in various colors to denote what minerals and vitamins they contained—thirty or more in all. Johnny took niacin, liver powder, lubile (dried powdered bile), vitamins A and D, iron, dicalcium phosphate with viosterol, and lugol. Iodine—in a precisely calculated amount—is essential to the cure.
    Johnny’s attitude to all this—he was a youngster with a vigorous, healthy appetite—can readily be imagined. He loathed the diet, but he held onto it with the utmost scrupulous fidelity. Carefully he checked off in his notebook the pills he took each day. Once the reason for a thing was explained to him, he faithfully accepted it. The jokes and protests he made were to let off steam, or provide wry humor to the occasion. One evening I asked him if he wanted some-thing, and he replied instantly, “A dose of bichloride of mercury.” Once he said that the husks of vegetable in the Gerson soup were deliberately left there as “abrasives to scour out the stomach” and he announced that he had discovered a cure for tapeworm. “Put the patient on the Gerson diet and the tapeworm will evacuate itself in despair.”
    All that Johnny was really losing was the taste of food. But the monotony depressed him and he sighed on one occasion. “Really, Mother, this is too much to bear!” Once as I was leaving for the evening he called out, “Have a big steak for me and come back and tell me all about it!” Later he was worried that when the diet finally ended there might still be a meat shortage. One night his voice was sick with worry. “Wouldn’t just a little meat strengthen me and help the bruised nerves in my head heal?”
    But he was getting better. This, overwhelmingly, was all that counted. The papilledema dropped sharply, and by the