Dr. Max Gerson Healing the Hopeless [Paperback]

Howard Straus (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: January 1, 2002

Life story of controversial health care pioneer, Dr. Max Gerson, including his dietary and detox therapies for treating cancer and chronic disease, including his well-known coffee enema. Dr. Gerson was the first medical ecologist, making the connection between health and environment. Born in Germany, he practiced medicine there until 1933 and made his reputation by curing tuberculosis and other degenerative diseases. He cured Dr. Albert Schweitzer's Type wife of lung tuberculosis with his special diet. Moving to the U.S., he wrote a controversial book on the links between nutrition and cancer: A Cancer Therapy: Results of 50 Cases(1958), and practiced medicine until his death in 1959. Undaunted by attacks on his ideas, Dr. Gerson founded nutritional treatment centers in New York State for cancer and other illnesses. The Gerson Institute in San Diego, CA, and the Gerson Clinic in Mexico, both founded by his daughter, Charlotte Gerson, still thrive.

Editorial Reviews

About the Author

Howard Straus is the grandson of Max Gerson. He lives in Carmel, California.

Product Details

• Paperback: 411 pages
• Publisher: Quarry Pr; First Edition edition (January 1, 2002)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 155082290X
• ISBN-13: 978-1550822908
• Product Dimensions: 8.9 x 5.9 x 1.1 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.4 pounds
• Average Customer Review: 4.9 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (11 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #917,086 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

More About the Author

Discover books, learn about writers, read author blogs, and more.

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

49 of 49 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Dr. Gerson, A Pioneer in The Search For A Cancer Cure, May 7, 2002

By 

Jonathan Paul (Salinas, CA United States) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Dr. Max Gerson Healing the Hopeless (Paperback)

This book tells the fascinating story of the life of Dr. Max Gerson who developed a successful dietary-based therapy for the cure of degenerative diseases, particularly cancer. Written by Gerson's grandson, it presents a personal yet objective portrait of a unique personality who has been called "one of the most eminent geniuses in the history of medicine" by none other than Nobel Laureate Albert Schweitzer. And yet, due to the accidents of history and deliberate suppression of his work by the medical establishment, Gerson is today not well known outside the small but growing community of alternative medicine.

The book is very well written and tells an engaging story about a subject that could easily be deathly dull or sugared with personal family recollections. To the contrary, it is a crisp, fast-moving, narrative that slows down in only a few places where lengthy sources, including some of Gerson's writings, are quoted.

The book covers two parallel stories: First, the life of Gerson, and second, the step-by step discovery of the pieces of the therapy that bear his name.

Gerson was born in Germany (now Poland) in 1881, the son of well-to-do Jewish parents. He was the product of the world-renowned German medical universities who began his practice as a neurologist. The book portrays a reserved, sometimes shy, proud man whose intolerance for foolish and petty behavior in others often earned him a reputation for arrogance and the enmity of many colleagues. Gerson is also portrayed as an absent-minded professor of medicine who leaves the details of finances and the care of the home to his wife. His complete energy and the focus of his life was directed toward the curing of his patients.

The most interesting part of the book is reading how Gerson discovered each aspect of his therapy over a period of thirty to forty years. The story begins with the curing of his own severe migraine headaches through diet modification. Over his working career Gerson modified and perfected his therapy to embrace a widening collection of chronic degenerative diseases. He seems to have been a master of observation, a keen analyst of the works of others, and a medical pragmatist and improviser. The bottom line was that he cured diseases in patients who had been given up by conventional medicine.

Gerson's life was not easy, and his amazing accomplishments must be measured against the barriers erected in his path. First, his life and medical practice was totally disrupted by the anti-Semitic policies of the Nazi party. He and his family fled in turn Germany, Austria, and France before settling in New York in 1936. There, in spite of his remarkable successes, the US medical establishment closed nearly all doors for Gerson to promote his ideas, to practice, and to publish his findings. One gets the feeling that the story is much worse than presented in the book, and that there existed a well-organized conspiracy within the medical industry to suppress Gerson's work. It seems that the author is holding back from making overt accusations that seem plain to the reader based on the facts presented.

By way of qualification, the reviewer is a cured cancer patient thanks to the Gerson therapy. So the book was especially relevant and exciting for me. But I believe that anyone interested in alternative medicine and healthy living will thoroughly enjoy this book. It adds to the growing body of literature describing Gerson's therapy, most notably Gerson "50 Cases" and Charlotte Gerson's "The Gerson Therapy". In summary, this book is good reading and the engaging history of a great man.

30 of 30 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars A GREAT BOOK, August 5, 2002

By 

"elias8040" (boston, MA USA) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Dr. Max Gerson Healing the Hopeless (Paperback)

This book is a wonderful and informative read. I found the storyline
portions to be riveting, especially the story of Dr. Max's escape from
the Nazis. Additionally fascinating were the historical facts of
Dr. Max's discoveries and disease-curing results and how they were
received by the mainstream medical establishments in Europe and USA.

The author's writing style is superb and very enjoyable to read.
I think that all readers will find the book interesting and will enjoy
learning Dr. Max's scientific & personal history and will recognize
the repeated chord the AMA strikes with regard to Dr. Max & the Gerson
diet. Also if readers follow recent health news & studies, they
have already seen many scientific studies
converging on the basic truths of Dr. Max's discoveries.

I strongly recommend this book and have bought copies for many friends
and relatives, and my primary-care MD... But in the
meantime, please buy your own copy and read it. It's a great book.

27 of 27 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Healing the Hopeless, July 22, 2004

By 

J. Ortiz - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Dr. Max Gerson Healing the Hopeless (Paperback)

Here is the story of an authentic struggler; of a man of strict discipline and iron will; of a humble server of Humanity and courageous and strong defender of his profound convictions.

With the historical contexts provided by writer Barbara Marinacci, Howard Straus leaves the realm of his academic field with the noble purpose of doing justice to his grandfather in a biography that ought to be required reading in more than one college subject.

Its reading is not only beneficial for anyone who is curious about knowledge, but also for those who take courses on the history of medicine, on nutrition, and even on the History of Europe of the beginning of the past century. Its reading certainly is indispensable in the field of the research of cancer as a specialized and highly lucrative industry.

The smoothly flowing account is organized in two parts on a chronological basis "The European Years" and "The American Years." It begins with the years Dr. Gerson lived in Europe because it was there, in Germany, where he was born in 1881. It ends in America because it was in the City of New York, in the American hemisphere, where he took refuge with his family in 1936, without knowledge of English, after he anticipated the imminent Nazi's barbarian affront against Humanity.

Without sacrificing details and without being boring, Straus describes the life of animosities, persecution, rejections, and reprisals that doctor Gerson faced on the part of the so-called medical class ? as well as an attempt to kill him with arsenic ?for having dared to dedicate the power of his genial intellect to finding a cure for patients who had been sentenced to a certain death that their physicians believed to be imminent.
With his careful research and daring innovations, Gerson made those galens look bad when he brought many of them back to health ? something they could not forgive him for.

In the course of doing research for this book, Straus had the support not only of his relatives and of former patients of his grandfather, but had also the benefit of abundant clinical files, handwritten notes, Gerson's formal and personal correspondence and of the book the intrepid physician got to publish: A Cancer Therapy: Results of 50 Cases (1958). Reference is made also to the numerous articles that this pioneer of holistic and alternative medicine wrote, as well as to the many that the entities that tried to discredit him, systematically refused to publish.

Although the justified pride with which the author describes his grandfather's odyssey in scientific research and in his unconventional practice of medicine is evident, the fact that he allows to see personality traits of him that could seem negative, at least at first glance, such as his rigid discipline and self esteem, is no less evident.

Moreover, plenty of evidence is shown pertaining to the role of some well known organizations to sabotage Gerson's work, that is, of entities which historically have reaped lucrative benefits from the fact that cancer is deemed an incurable disease. Within this context, Gerson told one of his patients in a letter in October 1954, that his "main opponent" was Dr. Cornelius P. Rhoads, whose name the American Association for Cancer Research has dropped recently from one of its awards.

When he learned that his physician and friend died of chronic pneumonia in March 1959, his compatriot, patient, and colleague, Albert Schweitzer, said about Gerson that he was "one of the most eminent geniuses in the history of medicine." Read this book and you will see why.

J. Ortiz
San Juan, P. R.