Nutrition and Orthomolecular
The People (14)
Physicians and scientists who treated food and nutrients at therapeutic doses as medicine — each page sets out their work, protocols and claims as they stated them.
Sebastian Kneipp
German Catholic priest and lay healer who built the Kneipp cure of cold-water applications, herbs, exercise, diet and order in Bavarian Wörishofen (1821–1897).
Read the deep dive →Max Bircher-Benner
Zurich physician who treated illness with raw fruit and vegetables, taught that food is stored sunlight, created Bircher muesli and ran the Lebendige Kraft sanatorium.
Read the deep dive →Sagen Ishizuka
Japanese army physician whose shokuyō food cure — whole grains, potassium–sodium balance, local food — became the root of macrobiotics; he coined the word shokuiku, food education.
Read the deep dive →Robert McCarrison
Ulster-born British physician in the Indian Medical Service who studied Himalayan goitre and at Coonoor compared Indian and British diets in rat-feeding experiments (1878–1960).
Read the deep dive →Joseph Goldberger
Hungarian-born American public health physician (1874–1929) who proved pellagra was a dietary deficiency, preventable by fresh foods and brewer's yeast.
Read the deep dive →Edward Mellanby
British physician and pharmacologist (1884–1955) whose dog experiments showed cod liver oil prevents rickets, leading to vitamin D.
Read the deep dive →Max Gerson
German-American physician (1881–1959) behind the Gerson Therapy: thirteen glasses of fresh organic juice a day, a saltless plant-based diet, potassium and coffee enemas.
Read the deep dive →Roger J. Williams
University of Texas biochemist who discovered pantothenic acid (vitamin B5), named folic acid, and argued in Biochemical Individuality (1956) that every person’s nutritional needs are unique.
Read the deep dive →Werner Kollath
German hygienist who founded whole-food (Vollwert) nutrition: “let our food be as natural as possible,” living versus dead foods, mesotrophy, and the fresh-grain Kollath breakfast.
Read the deep dive →Weston A. Price
Canadian-born dentist whose 1930s field studies of traditional peoples, gathered in Nutrition and Physical Degeneration (1939), tied their native diets to sound teeth and proposed “Activator X”.
Read the deep dive →Wilfrid & Evan Shute
Canadian physician brothers, an obstetrician and a cardiologist, who from 1946 promoted large doses of vitamin E for heart and circulatory disease in London, Ontario.
Read the deep dive →Frederick Klenner
American physician in Reidsville, North Carolina, who from the 1940s treated polio, pneumonia and other virus diseases with large injected doses of vitamin C.
Read the deep dive →Abram Hoffer
Canadian psychiatrist (1917–2009) who co-founded orthomolecular medicine and treated schizophrenia with high-dose niacin — vitamin B3 — and vitamin C.
Read the deep dive →Linus Pauling
The only person with two unshared Nobel Prizes, who championed high-dose vitamin C and named orthomolecular medicine in his 1968 Science paper.
Read the deep dive →