Calling of an Angl: Rene Caisse and Essiac Tea--5by Dr. Gary L. Glum |
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CHAPTER FIVEI know very little about Rene Caisse's life from 1942 until 1959. Sometime probably during the 1930s, she had married. Her husband's name was Charles McGaughey. He was a barrister, then a district magistrate, then a juvenile court judge. From the few newspaper accounts about his career, he seems to have been a widely respected member of the community. There are a few pieces of correspondence between Mr. McGaughey and the Canadian government, indicating that he supported Rene's activities and was prepared to write strong letters on her behalf when he felt she was wronged. The old newspaper photographs of Mr. McGaughey show a handsome man with a full head of hair and a nice smile, holding a pipe and wearing a three-piece suit. He and Rene didrit have any children, but he had four by a previous marriage. Mr. McGaughey was from North Bay, which probably influenced him and Rene to move back there when they decided to leave Bracebridge. Sometime after they moved, Rene apparently suffered what she herself later described as a nervous breakdown. After what she d been through, it's not hard to understand why. The breakdown, I've heard, didn't last long. One of Rene's best friends told me that Rene didn't even check herself into a hospital for treatment. She just stayed at home and did whatever she did until she recovered. That's the sum total of what I know about Rene's breakdown. Even her friends don't seem to know much about that chapter of Rene's life. For all practical purposes, she just disappeared for a few years. I wish I knew more. But I don't. One of the eeriest sensations I experienced in researching her story was near the end of reading through her files. Rene kept everything that dealt with Essiac, and also with cancer. Thousands of pages of correspondence, newspaper clippings, doctors' diagnoses-seemingly every shred of paper dealing with cancer-and when those files came to me, they came in large suitcases, all the papers and all the years thrown in together. After I had spent days reading and organizing this massive history Rene kept, it suddenly dawned on me that from 1942 until 1959 there was almost not a single sheet of paper. No letters, no newspapers. Nothing. It sent chills up my spine. To this day, I don't know if she kept files for those years and they were misplaced, or if there was never a file. In an ironic twist, the last sheet of paper before the 17 year gap in her files, dated January 9, 1942, is a letter from the chief of the Proprietary or Patent Medicine Division of the Canadian department of Pensions and National Health. Addressed to Rene at her North Bay address, it states in its entirety: "Dear Sir: Enclosed you will find license authorizing sale of the following preparation under THE PROPRIETARY OR PATENT MEDICINE ACT for the calendar year 1942: R.M.C. Kidney Pills, Reg. No. 20027. Please forward copies of labels, wrappers and all other literature used in connection with the above-named product." After all the sweat and blood and tears she lived through to treat cancer patients with Essiac, at the moment she was retreating into her own private life, the government sent her a "Dear Sir" letter issuing her a patent for...kidney pills. I didn't know whether to laugh or cry. But I had heard about those kidney pills in Bracebridge. They were sold in the drugstore. Rene gave them out. People said they helped. Some of the locals still remember them. I dorit know what was in them, or what they did, but in the middle of all her life and death battles over the treatment of cancer, Rene somehow managed to develop kidney pills-and get a patent on them. Rene herself, as far as I've been able to find out, didn't write much or speak out much on the pills. She knew they were effective and she used them. But she seemed to take it for granted, and they weren't a part of any crusade. Her attitude was as if to say, doesn't everybody develop patentable kidney pills in their spare time? What Rene did with the patent, what happened with the formula for those kidney pills, I have no idea. I haven't been able to find much information about the pills-except that some people in Bracebridge remember the drug store selling them many years ago-after that 1942 letter from the Canadian government. In 1943, Rene's husband Charles McGaughey died of pneumonia at the age of 57. Rene's best friend told me that Rene took his death very hard. Despite her paranoia about arrest, she had very quietly and very privately-only her closest friends knew anything about it-continued to treat certain desperately ill cancer patients with Essiac. The hours were long, she was apparently away from home traveling when necessary to treat people, and the secrecy created stress. When her husband died of complications from the pneumonia, Rene blamed herself. Her friend told me that Rene felt guilty for not devoting herself to nursing her husband's illness. Torn between her patients and her husband, she felt she had failed her husband. According to her friend, Rene became even more reclusive after her husband's death. Many old friends and patients didn't see her at all for years. But it is known that she traveled a lot. She took frequent trips -----especially during the winters-to Florida, where she stayed with a sister. Another sister was married to a wealthy man in the state of Washington, and Rene apparently visited them as often as possible. What little portrait of Rene I have in those years is one of a lonely woman, restless and searching, and alienated from any hope of ever seeing the world recognize and appreciate what she had accomplished with Essiac. Listening to her old friends-and her own statements made later-I got a strong sense that she had reconciled herself to a tragic defeat. It had to be a very painful reconciliation. Sometime in the late 1940s or early 1950s, Rene moved back home to Bracebridge. She was in her 60s by then, and still badly overweight. At that stage of her life, and after what she d been through, it would have been easy to slip into complete retirement and give up altogether. But Rene remained active. "Now, like Grandma Moses, I paint pictures," she wrote. From all accounts, she was a prolific artist, who loved to spend hours doing her oil paintings of natureflowers, countrysides-and still life of all kinds. The paintings are quite lovely. Not the work of a professional artist; but a talented and skilled amateur. She gave the paintings away, to friends and family members. There are people all around the Bracebridge area who are quick to pull out a Rene Caisse painting and show it proudly to a visitor. She passed some of her time writing about cancer and Essiac. She was a good writer, with an intimate knowledge of disease and medicine, based on a lifetime of medical experience. Everything she had learned and witnessed after treating thousands of cancer patients convinced her that cancer is a systemic disease, not a localized one, spread through the body via the blood stream, and that surgery, radium or X-rays targeted specifically at the area of a tumor is attacking the symptom and not the cause. In other words, a healthy system purified by healthy blood will not sustain a cancerous tumor. In a diseased system, if the tumor is surgically removed or destroyed with radium or X-rays, the cancer will eventually reappear elsewhere if the system isn't cleaned out and purified. Some of the herbs in Essiac, she wrote many times, acted as blood purifiers, attacking the cause of cancer rather than the symptoms. In one of her essays, written sometime during the 1950s, Rene wrote: "There are those of us who feel that cancer is more than a local disturbance in some distant organ of the body. This was impressed on me very deeply when, after making the rounds of a cancer ward in one of our best treatment centers, the surgeon in charge said to me: `This is not the answer."' By the late 1950s-with the same prescience as Rachel Carson who won international fame for her book, Silent Spring-Rene wrote in her personal essays a warning about agricultural pesticides and food preservatives, about all the chemicals we were spraying into our environment. Five years before scientific fear of Strontium 90 in radioactive fallout persuaded President Kennedy to sign the treaty against atmospheric testing of nuclear weapons, Rene was writing essays warning of the dangers we were facing from nuclear testing. But no one who knew her ever accused Rene Caisse of being all business, of having no time for play. All her old friends are quick to mention her sense of humor. She used to say it was the only thing that kept her sane and allowed her to survive all the heartbreak she lived through.
Her friends say that to some degree, she was a romantic at heart. They say
that she liked men, loved to joke with them, do a little harmless flirting
with them, all her life. In her younger years, she wrote some beautiful
love poems. Later she wrote a sweet, charming poem about younger women.
For the wry glimpse it provides into how Rene saw the personal side of
ordinary life, here is her poem entitled "An Honest Fact": Do not respect the ladies In the good old-fashioned way. The girls of to-day Do not demand respect they say They encourage the man In a very wrong way. They study "vamp" glances And do "toddle" dances Nor wait for the men To make the advances. Oh! Girls of today 'Tis a very wrong way. If you want your whole life To be happy and gay Create a modest style And a good old-fashioned smile. It is surely up to you to wear blushes that are true Then you'll find, the gentlemen Will show respect for you. In 1958, Rene was 70 years old. In addition to her writing and painting, she was still whipping up meals and holding court in her living room with nephews and nieces and old friends. They all say that she was remarkably energetic for a woman of her years and weight. And though the walls around her use of Essiac were high, indeed-very few people were allowed to know what, if anything, she was doing with it-she was still treating some unknown number of cancer patients. After a gap of almost 17 years in her files, one of the first papers from this later era of her life is dated September 10, 1958. It is a letter to the new Premier of Ontario, Leslie Frost, and it is a stern protest against recent governmental threats made to Rene. "Some time ago I wrote a letter to you," she wrote, "asking if it would be possible to put my Bill before the legislature in order to legalize my `Essiac' treatment of cancer. "You replied, saying that you had sent my letter on to the Cancer Commission. Well, they sent an officer here to arrest me but when I explained to him what I was doing for sick people, he did not arrest me but ordered me not to treat my patients. He told me to write to the College of Physicians and Surgeons and ask for an interview with Dr. McPhedran, which I did and was shocked to get such a rude reply." After 25 years, the government was still sending people to arrest Rene and she was still talking them out of it. Rene closed her letter to the premier: "The patients who were improving under my treatments are frantic and come begging for treatment. It is the hardest thing I have ever had to do, to turn them away. Is there anything that can be done to remedy this situation? I would appreciate a reply." Premier Frost replied that Rene should get in touch directly with the Deputy Minister of Health, Dr. W G. Brown. In October, 1958, Rene wrote Dr. Brown a long letter, outlining her position and saying, in part: "I had a man, a Mr. Schwartz, from Oshawa, call on me last Sunday. He said that since I treated him eight years ago for cancer of the spine, he has been, and is now, in perfect health. "I have a case now, a woman from North Bay with cancer of the breast, with secondaries under the arm. She was losing the use of her arm. Now it is localized in the breast, and she can use her arm quite freely, and has no pain. The primary is beginning to reduce. She is frantic because I have been ordered to stop treating. "I am glad that when Dr. McPhedran sent his policemen here to arrest me, that I had not too many patients to turn away. I closed my clinic years ago, but patients came begging for treatment at my home, and I could not turn them away. Now the onus is on the medical profession. I have to turn them away. Do not feel sorry for me, Dr. Brown; feel sorry for the many who cannot have the benefit of this Essiac treatment for cancer.' In January, 1959, Dr. Matthew B. Dymond, the Minister of Health-and a doctor who would in the future play a critical role in the story of Rene Caisse and Essiac-assured the Bracebridge representative to parliament that the College of Physicians and Surgeons would not prosecute Rene without notifying the Minister or his Deputy. "I gathered," Dr. Dymond wrote, "that it is their hope that Miss Caisse's activities might be controlled by means of surveillance, and that no prosecution would ever be necessary. So I do know that Rene remained active-and combative when necessary-even in those reclusive years from 1942 until 1959 when she stayed out of the spotlight as much as possible-and the letter from Dr. Dymond indicates that her fears about the government spying on her were not merely paranoia. The government was spying on her. But at the age of 70, her life was about to change dramatically again. After years of living quietly and without attention from the outside world, she was going to be under close scrutiny, with lots of questions being asked, and serious medical people paying close attention to Rene Caisse and Essiac. Introduction I 1 I 2 I 3 I 4 I 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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