She nettled Canada’s medical establishment for 50 years during which time she gave much needed hope to thousands of cancer patients who claimed her herbal tea had cured them. The story of Rene Caisse is surely the triumph of a good-hearted trained nurse serving humanity.

Born in Bracebridge, Ontario, to parents who had emigrated from France in the 1870s, Rene Caisse started her quest to alleviate cancer suffering in 1922 when she was a nurse in Haileybury, Ontario. Here, she met an elderly woman whose breast cancer had earlier been sent into remission by an Ojibwa medicine man whose only remedy was a decoction of four wayside herbs: burdock root, sheep sorrel, slippery elm bark, and turkey rhubarb root.

As a health care provider with an inquiring mind, she quietly experimented on laboratory mice by injecting them with various strains of carcinoma and then treating the resultant tumours with her “Essiac,” the herbal remedy which is an anagram of her surname.

Her first test case was her mother’s sister who was dying of stomach cancer. After consultation with her aunt’s doctor and under his watchful supervision, Rene treated her

aunt. The woman obtained full remission and lived another 21 years. Very impressed with the results, R.O. Fisher, M.D., her aunt’s doctor, asked Rene to treat still other cancer patients. Physicians began sending their own cancer patients to her under the magisterial aegis of her aunt’s doctor. Eight of these doctors were soon prompted to petition the Department of Health and Welfare in Ottawa to give nurse Caisse “an opportunity to prove her work in a big way.” This petition was dated at Toronto on October 27, 1926.

Word quickly spread. Dr. Frederick Banting, the co-discoverer of insulin, used his influence to petition the University of Toronto to give Rene access to laboratory facilities for her research. There was only one snag: the formula for Essiac would become exclusively the University’s. Nurse Caisse balked. She did not want her secret formula taken out of the public good and locked away. Hauled before the courts for practising without a licence, in each instance she produced, for all her patients, scripts duly authorised by their attending physicians.

In 1934, she, along with five of the doctors who had referred their patients to her and 12 of those patients, petitioned the Hon. Dr. J.A. Faulkner, Ontario’s Minister of Health. She was granted permission to continue her work as long as her patients were scripted by their attending physicians.
 

In 1959, the story of Essiac and Nurse Rene Caisse, then in her 70s, attracted the attention of Charles Brusch, M.D., John F. Kennedy’s personal physician and the first doctor in the U.S. to administer polio vaccine as well as the doctor after whom the world-famous Brusch Medical Centre in Boston is named. Caisse entered into an agreement with Brusch and the Medical Centre to research Essiac, an old Indian remedy for cancer. After Rene died in 1978, Dr. Brusch still administered Essiac to patients, claiming Essiac even cured his own colon cancer in 1984. This view of Rene Caisse appeared on a 1977 cover of Homemaker’s Magazine. [Photo, courtesy Bracebridge Historical Society]

That same year, Rene received the good news that her hometown was offering her the British Lion Hotel as a clinic. From 1934 until 1942, Bracebridge’s Cancer Clinic attracted hundreds of people a week, not all of them patients. But all of them went away impressed. Offers came from afar for her to set up new clinics at such places as Rochester, New York, and Chicago, Illinois. She politely declined them: she was too preoccupied.

On December 23, 1936, a group of doctors petitioned Queen’s Park: “... we, the undersigned do strongly urge that the ... Minister of Health take immediate action, to make this treatment [Essiac] available for cancer sufferers, and keep it a Canadian discovery.”

In 1938, a private member’s bill (No. 38, 2 George VI, 1938) was proposed as “an Act to authorize Rene Caisse to practise medicine in the Province of Ontario in the treatment of Cancer....” The Bill was signed by 55 thousand persons in favour of its passage, including 387 patients. Many of the signatories were doctors.

Before a vote was taken, the government set up a Royal Cancer Commission. Over 2000 documented cases of cancer cures came forward, but only 49 were reviewed. The final verdict: “not enough evidence was found to substantiate the claims of Essiac.”

Because Essiac was not government-approved as a drug-related treatment for cancer, nurse Caisse closed her clinic in 1942 fearing slander, lawsuits and – ultimately – jail.

Nevertheless, people still persisted in seeing her – in some cases, literally in the dark of night. As always, Rene Caisse refused monetary payment for her services. Untold numbers of cancer sufferers were assisted in this quiet manner. The mainstream medical institutions, however, continued to portray her as a misguided simpleton touting a “witch doctor’s brew.”

Her personal triumph lies in the fact that she never did turn her herbal formula over to any authorities. Her great satisfaction lay in the fact that no one, through scientific experiment, ever proved that her herbal tea does not work. Her legacy lies in the fact that today thousands of people are still using the Essiac formula with some success.

Rene Caisse died peacefully in 1978 at her Muskoka home. Her repeated response to those who asked her why she never tried to get money out of Essiac might well serve as her epitaph: “The love and respect of my fellow man means more than riches.”

Michael Eldred