Essiac Essentials

conventionally beautiful woman. There are no records of any love affairs or attachments and, by her mid-twenties, her genetic weight problem was becoming evident. She was intelligent and highly intuitive but growing up in a large Catholic family in a small town in Canada at the turn of the twentieth century meant that there would never be any money for a college education, especially for a girl.
     
     
    Rene's Introduction to Essiac
     
    Rene went into nursing, training in New York State and Greenwich, Connecticut, and graduating as a registered nurse when she was twenty-two. She was in her mid-thirties, still unmarried and working as head nurse at a hospital in Northern Ontario when, in her own words,
    “One day one of my nurses was bathing an elderly lady patient. I noticed that one breast was a mass of scar tissue and asked her about it.
    “ ‘I came out from England nearly thirty years ago,’ she told me. ‘I joined my husband, who was prospecting in the wilds of Northern Ontario. My right breast became sore and swollen and very painful. My husband brought me to Toronto and the doctors told me I had advanced cancer and that my breast must be removed at once. Before we left camp a very old Indian medicine man bad told me I had cancer but he could cure it. I decided I’d just as soon try his remedy as to have my breast removed. One of my friends had died from breast surgery. Besides we had no money.’
    “She and her husband returned to the mining camp and the old Indian showed her certain herbs that were growing in the area, told her how to make a tea from these herbs and to drink it every day.
    “She was nearly eighty-years-old when I saw her and there had been no recurrence of cancer. I was much interested 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 just about the same as a death sentence. I decided that, if I should ever develop cancer, I would use this herb tea.
    “About a year later, I was visiting an aged retired doctor, whom I knew well. We were walking slowly about his garden when he took his cane and lifted a weed.
    “‘Nurse Caisse,’ he told me, ‘if people would use this weed there would be little or no cancer in the world. ’
    “He told me the name of the plant. It was one of the herbs my patient had named as an ingredient of the Indian medicine man’s tea!”
    The weed the old doctor had pointed out was Sheep sorrel.
     
     
    The Development of the Essiac Recipe
     
    Rene did nothing with the recipe until her aunt was diagnosed with inoperable stomach cancer in 1924 and given six months to live. With the permission of Dr. R. O. Fisher, with whom she was working and under his observation, Rene made up the herbal decoction and administered it to her aunt who lived for another twenty-one years with no recurrence of the cancer.
    Dr. Fisher was so impressed by the result of the experiment that he asked her to treat several more of his hopelessly terminal patients. Some of his associates followed suit. One of the female patients had cancer combined with diabetes. Rene refused to treat her until she was taken off insulin because she was terrified of taking the responsibility for administrating the unproven formula in conjunction with a prescribed drug. As it happened, the diabetes disappeared first and the woman was pronounced clear of cancer within a year.
    That same year Rene was asked to treat an old man whose face had been eaten away by a skin cancer and badly burned by radium treatment. His face was bleeding so badly that he was not expected to live for more than a few days. Rene treated him with a solution of Sheep sorrel and Blood root (another plant native to Canada) and the haemorrhage stopped within twenty-four hours. His face healed sufficiently for him to live fairly comfortably for the remaining six months of his life.
    When Rene, at the doctor’s request, injected her medication containing the eight herbs directly into the tongue of a man with cancer of the throat and tongue, there was a violent reaction. She later recalled,
    “I was nearly scared to death! The patient developed a severe chill and his tongue swelled so badly the doctor had to press it down with a spatula to let him breathe; this lasted about 20 minutes. Then the swelling went down and the shaking subsided. ” According to Rene the cancer stopped growing and the patient lived quite comfortably for almost four