Essiac Essentials

three months. The condition of a number of the patients who had been in remission had deteriorated and some of them were dead. The Commission was formally appointed later that month and Rene was interviewed during the following October. She invited them to visit the clinic. Two commissioners, Dr. T.H. Callahan and Professor R.C. Wallace, accepted the invitation for February 1939.
     
     
    Questioned by Commissioners.
     
    When Commissioner Callahan asked Rene about her current attitude regarding revealing the formula she replied:
    “I still insist that I must have it acknowledged on its merit before I can give it, on the results I am getting. I think I am justified in asking that, Dr. Callahan. What do you think, Principal Wallace?”
    “I am afraid I disagree with you, Miss Caisse,” he said.
    “I am perfectly willing to give it for the sake of suffering humanity without any strings attached, and I feel that I am justified in asking assurance that suffering humanity will have the benefit of it. ”
    Commissioner Callahan replied:
    “There can be no question about that, if it was acknowledged to be of benefit to suffering humanity, as any other case in the past in medical science has had the benefit of it. That is the point you need worry about least of all, it seems to me.”
    “I do not think so,” she said.
    The Commissioners stayed for one and a half days in Bracebridge, catching the train back to Toronto early in the afternoon of the second day in time for the rest of the weekend break.
    The resulting report was sceptical, noting that there had been no clear verification by biopsy available for investigation.
    The Commission examined her records and filed them for exhibit in the forthcoming Cancer Hearing scheduled to be held at the Royal York Hotel in Toronto on July 4th.
    Approximately fifty patients were able to attend the hearing that summer, of whom thirty-five were summoned to testify on Rene’s behalf. Dr. Benjamin L. Guyatt was the thirty-sixth and last witness to be called. Six months later, in January 1940, Rene was issued with an interim report which concluded that the formula had no merit. A final report was never published.
    Rene had married her lawyer, Charles McGaughey, in 1938. Disillusioned and exhausted, she was fifty-three years old when the clinic in Bracebridge was finally closed in 1941. She moved away to North Bay where her husband had his practice. With his help she took out a lifetime patent in 1942 on another formula she had been developing in tablet form to treat prostate cancer and kidney problems. The tablets would be on the market until 1976 when the Canadian government cancelled the patent. She continued to treat a few patients surreptitiously with Essiac in North Bay until her husband’s death in 1943 at the age of fifty-seven.
    Rene would be under surveillance by the Ontario College of Physicians and Surgeons for the rest of her life. She moved back to Bracebridge and very little more was heard of her until she was introduced to Dr Charles A. Brusch from Cambridge, Massachusetts in 1959. He set up animal and human studies to investigate the properties of the tea but they were terminated in 1960 as inconclusive. A laboratory report dated April 21st 1960, which was requested and paid for by Rene, concluded that the formula was impossible to analyse.
    She lived almost as a recluse, treating very few patients and remaining practically unknown to the rest of the town. She painted pictures and made beadwork for necklaces and costume jewellery. Often lonely and frustrated, sometimes bitter, Rene never truly lost her sense of humour and was not in the habit of openly complaining about her own physical problems. Mary McPherson was a long-standing and loyal friend who had played a major role in collecting signatures for the petitions in the 1930s. After Mary’s retirement in 1969, she often kept Rene company during the evenings when her own husband was working the late shift as a security guard at the hospital.
     
     
    Interest in Essiac Grows
     
    Apart from some correspondence with Dr. Chester Stock concerning another animal study that had been set up at the Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Institute in New York City, Rene’s life was uneventful until July 1977 when Homemakers Magazine in Toronto published an article about her in its summer edition, entitled “ Could Essiac Halt Cancer?”
    Following publication, both Rene and the editors of the magazine were inundated with