Frederick Klenner: The Vitamin C Doctor of Reidsville

Table of Contents

1. Deep-Dive Articles
2. Who Frederick Klenner Was
3. The Discovery on One Page
4. The Natural Source: Lemons, Boneset and Ascorbic Acid
5. The Second Strand: B Vitamins for Nerve Disease
6. Timeline at a Glance
7. Later Significance
8. Key Research Papers
9. Connections
10. Featured Videos

Deep-Dive Articles

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1. Who Frederick Klenner Was

Klenner was born on 22 October 1907 in Johnstown, Pennsylvania, one of at least eight children of a German-American family. In a 1971 paper he recalled that his family drank bitter boneset tea for colds and fevers, and that in the influenza of 1918 “the Klenners survived when scores about us were dying.” He took degrees in biology at Saint Vincent and Saint Francis colleges in Pennsylvania, held a teaching fellowship in chemistry at the Catholic University of America while working toward a doctorate in physiology, and then moved to Duke University, where the head of physiology persuaded him to study medicine. He took his M.D. at Duke in 1936 and in 1937 married Annie Hill Sharp, the nursing student who had cared for him through an illness there.

After three years of hospital training at the North Carolina Tuberculosis Sanatorium he settled in Annie’s home town of Reidsville. He specialised in diseases of the chest but kept a general practice, according to his 1971 author biography, “because of the opportunities it afforded for observations in medicine.” He held privileges at Annie Penn Memorial Hospital, where on 23 May 1946 he delivered the Fultz sisters, recorded as the first identical African American quadruplets. Later writers have also recorded criticism of how the infants were treated and of his political views; the Life and Career article sets out that record. He died of heart disease in Eden, North Carolina, on 20 May 1984.

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2. The Discovery on One Page

By his own accounts, Klenner’s first use of vitamin C against infection came in the early 1940s. A later account by the writer Robert Landwehr places it after he had given his wife injections for bleeding gums; Klenner himself, in a 1977 newspaper interview quoted by Andrew Saul, described going to the house of a man near death from virus pneumonia, giving him “one big shot with five grams,” and thinking, “This is doing something.” The journal biography printed with his 1971 paper records that he gave the first massive doses to himself.

• 1948 — virus pneumonia. His first paper described 42 cases over five years treated with 1,000 mg of vitamin C by vein every six to twelve hours, and reported “complete clinical and x-ray response in all of our cases.” He wrote cautiously that there was not yet evidence that it was “a virus killer.”
• 1949 — poliomyelitis. During the 1948 North Carolina epidemic, he reported, sixty patients with polio came under his care, fifteen of them confirmed by lumbar puncture. He gave 1,000–2,000 mg by injection every two to four hours, guided by the temperature, and wrote that “all patients were clinically well after 72 hours.” The same paper reported shingles, chickenpox, measles, mumps, influenza and virus encephalitis.
• June 1949 — the AMA session. Speaking in a discussion at the American Medical Association’s annual session, he said, as Landwehr quotes the printed record, that if vitamin C in doses of 6,000 to 20,000 mg a day were given to polio patients “none will be paralyzed.” No later speaker took up his remarks.
• 1951–1971 — larger doses, more diseases. Further papers covered massive doses in virus disease, vitamins and massage in polio, and case reports of tetanus, snakebite and spider bite. By 1971 he wrote of giving tens of grams by vein in some conditions. These figures are reported as history in the virus diseases article, each tied to its year and paper.

His series had no control groups, and he wrote openly that he did not routinely perform lumbar punctures in part because a confirmed diagnosis would have to be reported to the health authorities. Those facts are part of the record of the papers, alongside his results as he described them.

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3. The Natural Source: Lemons, Boneset and Ascorbic Acid

Klenner’s medicine was a food substance. He opened his 1953 paper, “The use of vitamin C as an antibiotic,” with a seventeenth-century colonist’s plea to “bring juice of lemons,” and he still used the name “hexuronic acid” that Albert Szent-Györgyi gave the compound when he isolated it in 1928, four years before it was identified as vitamin C. In nature it is found in citrus, guavas, peppers, berries and green leaves (see Vitamin C: Food Sources), and almost every animal makes its own; humans, some other primates and guinea pigs are among the few that cannot. Klenner adopted Irwin Stone’s word “hypoascorbemia” for that inherited shortfall, and Pauling made a related evolutionary argument in 1970.

Klenner traced his interest back to a plant: the boneset tea of his childhood, which he later wrote he had assayed and believed to hold a great deal of “natural vitamin C.” That is his own statement; boneset is not a recognised source of the vitamin. The injectable form he used was, according to the physician Robert Cathcart, sodium ascorbate made up by Annie Klenner. Later pharmacokinetic studies found that blood levels from the mouth level off near one gram a day, while injection reaches concentrations many times higher — one modern explanation of why his injected route behaved differently from ordinary dietary amounts. The Ascorbic Acid article covers that science and the hazards later reported.

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4. The Second Strand: B Vitamins for Nerve Disease

Beside vitamin C, Klenner ran a second programme for more than twenty years: very large doses of the B vitamins for multiple sclerosis and myasthenia gravis. He opened the subject in a 1949 paper on fatigue and set out his full programme in the Journal of Applied Nutrition in 1973. He built on earlier work — Elias Stern’s intraspinal thiamine injections of 1938 and Matthew Moore’s nicotinic acid and thiamine treatment of 1940 — and on the idea that nerve degeneration could follow deficiencies of several B vitamins at once.

As Saul quotes the 1973 paper, the programme combined thiamine, niacin taken to the point of a flush, pyridoxine, vitamin B12 and riboflavin by injection, vitamin C, minerals, crude liver extract and a whole-food diet with “no junk foods, especially sweets.” Klenner’s stated aim was “to effect nerve repair.” The B-vitamin article describes the protocol as history and quotes his claim in context.

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5. Timeline at a Glance

• 1907 — Born 22 October in Johnstown, Pennsylvania.
• 1918 — The influenza pandemic; the family’s boneset tea, as he later remembered it.
• 1928 — Szent-Györgyi isolates “hexuronic acid,” identified as vitamin C in 1932.
• 1935–1939 — Claus Jungeblut’s monkey experiments with vitamin C and poliovirus; Albert Sabin’s negative report of 1939.
• 1936 — M.D., Duke University School of Medicine; marries Annie Hill Sharp in 1937.
• Late 1930s — Three years at the North Carolina Tuberculosis Sanatorium; then private practice in Reidsville.
• Early 1940s — First injections of vitamin C against virus pneumonia, by his own and Landwehr’s accounts.
• 1946 — Delivers the Fultz quadruplets at Annie Penn Memorial Hospital, 23 May.
• 1948 — “Virus pneumonia and its treatment with vitamin C”; the North Carolina polio epidemic.
• 1949 — The polio and virus diseases paper; the fatigue, myasthenia gravis and multiple sclerosis paper; remarks at the AMA session in June.
• 1951–1952 — Papers on massive doses in virus disease and on vitamins and massage in acute polio.
• 1953 — “The use of vitamin C as an antibiotic,” Journal of Applied Nutrition.
• 1971 — His long paper on the dose and administration of ascorbic acid “beyond the range of a vitamin.”
• 1973 — The B-complex paper on peripheral and central nerve disease.
• 1974 — “Significance of high daily intake of ascorbic acid in preventive medicine.”
• 1984 — Dies 20 May in Eden, North Carolina, aged 76.
• 1988 — Lendon H. Smith publishes the Clinical Guide to the Use of Vitamin C, gathering his work, with a foreword by Pauling.
• 2005 — Inducted into the Orthomolecular Medicine Hall of Fame.

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6. Later Significance

Klenner’s idea that vitamin C could be used “beyond the range of a vitamin” passed to Robert Cathcart, whose “bowel tolerance” method of oral dosing (1981) grew from Klenner’s practice of giving vitamin C by mouth “to tolerance,” and to Thomas Levy and the orthomolecular physicians around Pauling and Abram Hoffer. Pauling’s own work on vitamin C and the common cold drew on the same tradition.

Later research has looked at intravenous vitamin C in several ways. Pharmacokinetic work at the US National Institutes of Health (Padayatty and colleagues, 2004) found that only intravenous dosing produces very high blood concentrations. In a 2018 review the critical-care physician Paul Marik named Klenner’s 1949 paper as the start of intravenous vitamin C and called the early assumption that it was directly virus-killing in the body “mistaken.” Two randomised trials in sepsis gave 50 mg per kilogram every six hours for up to four days: CITRIS-ALI (2019, 167 patients) found no significant difference in its primary measures of organ failure and inflammation, and LOVIT (2022, 872 patients) reported death or persistent organ dysfunction in 44.5% of the vitamin C group against 38.5% with placebo. These trials and the cancer studies are described in the B-vitamin and legacy article; see also Vitamin C and ICU Recovery.

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Key Research Papers

1. Klenner FR. Virus pneumonia and its treatment with vitamin C. South Med Surg. 1948;110(2):36-8. PubMed PMID: 18900646
2. Klenner FR. The treatment of poliomyelitis and other virus diseases with vitamin C. South Med Surg. 1949;111(7):209-14. PubMed PMID: 18147027
3. Klenner FR. Fatigue, normal and pathological, with special consideration of myasthenia gravis and multiple sclerosis. South Med Surg. 1949;111(9):273-7. PubMed PMID: 18140958
4. Klenner FR. Massive doses of vitamin C and the virus diseases. South Med Surg. 1951;113(4):101-7. PubMed PMID: 14855098
5. Klenner FR. The vitamin and massage treatment for acute poliomyelitis. South Med Surg. 1952;114(8):194-7. PubMed PMID: 12984224
6. Szent-Györgyi A. Observations on the function of peroxidase systems and the chemistry of the adrenal cortex: Description of a new carbohydrate derivative. Biochem J. 1928;22(6):1387-409. PubMed PMID: 16744155
7. Pauling L. Evolution and the need for ascorbic acid. Proc Natl Acad Sci U S A. 1970;67(4):1643-8. PubMed PMID: 5275366
8. Cathcart RF. Vitamin C, titrating to bowel tolerance, anascorbemia, and acute induced scurvy. Med Hypotheses. 1981;7(11):1359-76. PubMed PMID: 7321921
9. Padayatty SJ, Sun H, Wang Y, Riordan HD, Hewitt SM, Katz A, et al. Vitamin C pharmacokinetics: implications for oral and intravenous use. Ann Intern Med. 2004;140(7):533-7. PubMed PMID: 15068981
10. Marik PE. Hydrocortisone, Ascorbic Acid and Thiamine (HAT Therapy) for the Treatment of Sepsis. Focus on Ascorbic Acid. Nutrients. 2018;10(11):1762. PubMed PMID: 30441816
11. Fowler AA 3rd, Truwit JD, Hite RD, Morris PE, DeWilde C, Priday A, et al. Effect of Vitamin C Infusion on Organ Failure and Biomarkers of Inflammation and Vascular Injury in Patients With Sepsis and Severe Acute Respiratory Failure: The CITRIS-ALI Randomized Clinical Trial. JAMA. 2019;322(13):1261-1270. PubMed PMID: 31573637
12. Lamontagne F, Masse MH, Menard J, Sprague S, Pinto R, Heyland DK, et al. Intravenous Vitamin C in Adults with Sepsis in the Intensive Care Unit. N Engl J Med. 2022;386(25):2387-2398. PubMed PMID: 35704292

PubMed Topic Searches

1. Klenner FR — author record in PubMed
2. Vitamin C and poliomyelitis
3. Intravenous ascorbic acid pharmacokinetics
4. Intravenous vitamin C in sepsis: randomised trials

Further Reading

• Klenner FR. The use of vitamin C as an antibiotic. Journal of Applied Nutrition. 1953;6:274-8.
• Klenner FR. Observations on the dose and administration of ascorbic acid when employed beyond the range of a vitamin in human pathology. Journal of Applied Nutrition. 1971;23(3&4):61-88.
• Klenner FR. Significance of high daily intake of ascorbic acid in preventive medicine. Journal of the International Academy of Preventive Medicine. 1974;1(1):45-69.
• Saul AW. Hidden in Plain Sight: The Pioneering Work of Frederick Robert Klenner, M.D. Journal of Orthomolecular Medicine. 2007;22(1):31-38.
• Landwehr R. The Origin of the 42-Year Stonewall of Vitamin C. Journal of Orthomolecular Medicine. 1991;6(2):99-103.
• Smith LH, ed. Clinical Guide to the Use of Vitamin C: The Clinical Experiences of Frederick R. Klenner, M.D. Life Sciences Press; 1988.

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Connections

• Nutrition and Orthomolecular
• Frederick Klenner: Life and Career
• Vitamin C and the Virus Diseases: Klenner’s Polio and Pneumonia Reports
• Ascorbic Acid: The Natural Source and Science Behind Klenner’s Work
• Klenner’s B-Vitamin Protocol for Multiple Sclerosis and Myasthenia Gravis
• Vitamin C
• Linus Pauling: Vitamin C and Orthomolecular Medicine
• Dr. Abram Hoffer and Orthomolecular Medicine
• Albert Szent-Györgyi: The Man Who Discovered Vitamin C
• Enders, Weller & Robbins: Growing Poliovirus
• Pneumonia
• Multiple Sclerosis (MS)

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