Frederick Klenner: Life and Career

Frederick Robert Klenner was a small-town doctor who never held a university post, never ran a laboratory and never wrote the book he planned. For more than thirty years he practised medicine from an office above a drug store in Reidsville, North Carolina, with his wife as his only nurse. From that office, beginning in the early 1940s, he gave vitamin C — ascorbic acid, the substance in lemons and oranges that prevents scurvy — by injection, in amounts far beyond anything used before, to patients with pneumonia, polio and other virus diseases. He reported what he saw in a string of papers in regional medical journals between 1948 and 1974, and he is now named, by admirers and critics alike, as the starting point of high-dose intravenous vitamin C.

This page tells the story of his life: a Pennsylvania childhood in a large German-American family and a bitter herbal tea that he credited with seeing the family through the 1918 influenza; a long road through biology and chemistry to a Duke medical degree; marriage to a nurse who became his partner in practice; the tuberculosis sanatorium years; the Reidsville practice, the hospital deliveries and the “Vitamin C Babies”; the birth of the Fultz quadruplets in 1946; his papers; and his death in 1984. The biographical record rests largely on a small number of sources — the short author biography printed with his 1971 paper, Andrew W. Saul’s 2007 profile in the Journal of Orthomolecular Medicine (an admiring account that itself draws on newspaper interviews and a 1988 book), Robert Landwehr’s 1991 article, the Orthomolecular Medicine Hall of Fame citation and a Find a Grave memorial — and the details below are attributed to them. What he did with vitamin C is told in full on the companion page Vitamin C and the Virus Diseases.

Table of Contents

  1. A Johnstown Childhood and the Boneset Remedy
  2. Biology, Chemistry and the Road to Duke
  3. A Medical Degree and Annie Hill Sharp (1936–1937)
  4. The Tuberculosis Sanatorium Years
  5. A Chest Physician’s Practice in Reidsville
  6. Annie Penn Hospital and the ‘Vitamin C Babies’
  7. The Fultz Quadruplets (1946)
  8. Twenty-Eight Papers, 1948–1974
  9. Final Years and Death (1984)
  10. Remembered: The Clinical Guide and the Hall of Fame
  11. Key Research Papers
  12. Connections

1. A Johnstown Childhood and the Boneset Remedy

Klenner was born on 22 October 1907 in Johnstown, Cambria County, Pennsylvania, a steel town in the Allegheny hills. His parents were Frank Joseph Klenner (1868–1951) and Mary Bewak Klenner (1870–1948), and the Find a Grave memorial lists him among at least eight children, the older siblings born between 1892 and 1905. The family was of German-American descent.

Late in life he wrote down one childhood memory that he connected with his later work. In his 1971 paper in the Journal of Applied Nutrition he recalled that the Klenners, like many Pennsylvania families of the time, drank a bitter tea of boneset (Eupatorium perfoliatum), a North American wildflower long used in folk medicine for colds and fevers. He described the influenza pandemic of 1918 in these words: “The Flu of 1918 stands out very forcefully in that the Klenners survived when scores about us were dying.”

He went further. He wrote that he had later assayed boneset and believed it contained large amounts of what he called “natural vitamin C”, and he saw in the family remedy an early, unknowing use of the substance he would spend his career injecting. That was his own interpretation, recorded in his own paper; boneset does not appear among the recognised food sources of vitamin C, and no measured figure from his assay is given here. The plant’s place in American folk medicine, and in the 1918 pandemic in particular, is described on the site’s Boneset page, and the pandemic itself on Influenza: History and Discovery.

The memory is told here as he told it, more than fifty years after the event. It shows how Klenner himself connected his work to a natural remedy: in his own retelling, a line ran from a bitter family tea to the vitamin found in fruit.

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2. Biology, Chemistry and the Road to Duke

Klenner did not go straight into medicine. According to the author biography printed with his 1971 paper, he earned a bachelor’s and a master’s degree in biology from “St. Vincent and St. Francis College” — two Catholic colleges in western Pennsylvania, Saint Vincent College in Latrobe and Saint Francis College in Loretto — graduating magna cum laude. He held a teaching fellowship there and won the college medal for scholastic philosophy. The biography names the two colleges together as if they were one institution, and Saul writes “Colleges”; which degree came from which college is not recorded in either source.

He then moved to Washington, D.C., to a teaching fellowship in chemistry at the Catholic University of America, while working toward a doctorate in physiology. The training in chemistry was to show in his later papers, which discuss vitamin C as a chemical — a reducing agent, an acid and a salt — as much as a nutrient.

From Washington he went south to Duke University in Durham, North Carolina, still intending a career in physiology. There, the 1971 biography says, the chairman of physiology, named only as “Dr. Pearse”, persuaded him to enter medical school instead. He came to medicine with years of laboratory biology and chemistry already behind him.

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3. A Medical Degree and Annie Hill Sharp (1936–1937)

Klenner received his M.D. from the Duke University School of Medicine in 1936, a date given consistently by the 1971 biography, the Find a Grave memorial, the Hall of Fame citation and Saul.

At Duke he met Annie Hill Sharp, born on 19 February 1914, a senior nursing student who, in the account Saul relays from the 1988 book Bitter Blood by the journalist Jerry Bledsoe, nursed him through an illness. They married in 1937. Annie came from Reidsville, a tobacco and textile town in Rockingham County near the Virginia line, and she belonged to a well-known family there: her sister Susie Sharp became a judge and later Chief Justice of the Supreme Court of North Carolina.

The marriage shaped the rest of his working life. Annie Klenner trained as a nurse, and for decades she was the only other person in his practice — his nurse, his assistant and, according to the physician Robert Cathcart’s note on the transcription of the 1971 paper, the person who made up the sodium ascorbate solution he injected. She outlived him by nearly twenty years, dying in 2003.

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4. The Tuberculosis Sanatorium Years

After his degree Klenner spent three years in postgraduate hospital training, and the 1971 biography and the Find a Grave memorial both place that training at the North Carolina Tuberculosis Sanatorium. (Saul, following Bledsoe, places the young couple in Winston-Salem at this time; the location of his post is not independently confirmed in the sources gathered for this page.)

Tuberculosis was then one of the leading causes of death in the United States, and in the late 1930s there was no drug that reliably cured it — streptomycin, the first effective antibiotic against the disease, was not discovered until 1943–1944. Sanatorium care meant rest, fresh air, good food and close observation of the lungs, often for months or years, together with chest X-rays and surgical procedures to rest a diseased lung. A young doctor in that setting worked daily with chest films and followed the slow course of lung disease patient by patient.

The sanatorium years gave Klenner his specialty. He became a chest physician, and much of his first vitamin C work, a few years later, was on pneumonia and other lung infections. The modern disease is described on the site’s Tuberculosis (TB) page.

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5. A Chest Physician’s Practice in Reidsville

When his training ended, Klenner set up in private practice in Reidsville, Annie’s home town. In the words of his 1971 biography, he specialised in diseases of the chest but kept a general practice “because of the opportunities it afforded for observations in medicine.” He would stay there for the rest of his career.

The picture of the practice comes from newspaper reporting quoted by Saul. The Greensboro Daily News described an office above a drug store, with a sign that read “Limited General Practice”, where Klenner and his wife, as his full-time nurse, worked alone. Bledsoe, again as quoted by Saul, wrote that he never sent bills and that he made house calls at any hour. These details come from admiring and journalistic sources and are given here as they reported them.

The first vitamin C cases

It was in this practice, in the early 1940s, that Klenner first gave large doses of vitamin C by injection. Landwehr (1991) wrote that the first occasion was around 1942, when Annie had bleeding gums and he injected vitamin C for her, and that he next treated a man near death from virus pneumonia who had refused to go to hospital. Klenner himself, writing in 1953, dated the beginning to “ten years ago in a modest rural home.” The 1971 author biography adds that “The first massive doses of ascorbic acid he gave to himself.” The story of those cases, and of the papers that followed, is told on Vitamin C and the Virus Diseases.

His standing in the town was mixed. The Find a Grave memorial says he was “shunned by many in the local medical community for what they saw as his unconventional treatment of ailments and diseases,” a contrast with the picture of his practice that the newspaper and book accounts draw.

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6. Annie Penn Hospital and the ‘Vitamin C Babies’

Klenner held hospital privileges at Annie Penn Memorial Hospital in Reidsville, and as a general practitioner in a small town he delivered many babies there. Pregnancy became one of the settings in which he used vitamin C by mouth rather than by injection.

In his 1971 paper he reported a series of more than 300 consecutive obstetric patients who took vitamin C by mouth throughout pregnancy, in daily amounts of several grams that rose from one trimester to the next. He wrote that the nursing staff at the hospital came to call the infants born in this series the “Vitamin C Babies.” The phrase was later picked up by the biochemist Irwin Stone, who wrote of the “Vitamin C Babies” in his 1972 book The Healing Factor, according to Saul. The amounts are reported here as Klenner’s own historical account of his practice; they are not instructions, and the details belong with the rest of his dosing record on the companion page.

The series is known only from Klenner’s own paper, which reports no comparison group.

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7. The Fultz Quadruplets (1946)

The most famous birth Klenner attended took place at Annie Penn Hospital on 23 May 1946. He had expected triplets from an X-ray; four girls were born — the Fultz sisters, recorded as the first identical African American quadruplets. A Black nurse, Margaret Ware, assisted at the delivery, and the hospital had no incubator. Klenner named the four girls Mary Louise, Mary Ann, Mary Alice and Mary Catherine — “Mary” for the mother of Jesus, the second names taken from his own family.

In his 1971 paper he included the quadruplets in his vitamin C pregnancy series and described their care: they “were in this series” and were “started on 50 mg ascorbic acid the first day and, of course, this was increased.” Of the conditions in which they were kept alive, he wrote: “Our only nursery equipment was one hospital bed, an old, used single unit hot plate and an equally old 10 quart kettle. Humidity and ascorbic acid tells this story.”

The quadruplets became a national story. A commercial sponsorship for the sisters was arranged by Klenner, and its contract was administered by Annie’s sister Susie Sharp. Later writers — an article in O magazine in 2005 and the legal scholar Andrea Freeman in her 2020 book Skimmed — questioned the consent and ethics of the vitamin C injections given to the infants and recorded his political views of the period, as summarised in the published accounts of the sisters’ lives.

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8. Twenty-Eight Papers, 1948–1974

Klenner published his observations not in the national journals but in regional ones: Southern Medicine and Surgery, the Tri-State Medical Journal (the journal of the medical association of the Carolinas and Virginia) and, later, the Journal of Applied Nutrition. Landwehr counted twenty-eight papers through 1974, as quoted by Saul; the Find a Grave memorial gives twenty-seven. Only five are indexed in MEDLINE, the database behind PubMed — all from Southern Medicine and Surgery between 1948 and 1952, and none with an abstract.

The indexed papers

Later papers

From 1953 he wrote for the Journal of Applied Nutrition: “The use of vitamin C as an antibiotic” (1953), which opens with the seventeenth-century colonist Edward Winslow’s advice to “Bring juice of lemons”; the long 1971 review “Observations on the dose and administration of ascorbic acid when employed beyond the range of a vitamin in human pathology”; and the 1973 paper on mega-doses of the B complex in nerve disease. In the Tri-State Medical Journal of the 1950s he published case reports, listed in Saul’s bibliography, on tetanus, trichinosis, a black widow spider bite, a copperhead bite in a four-year-old child, an office test for vitamin C in the blood and encephalitis after pneumonia; in the same journal in the mid-1950s he also published critiques of the killed polio vaccine. His last paper, “Significance of high daily intake of ascorbic acid in preventive medicine”, appeared in the first issue of the Journal of the International Academy of Preventive Medicine in 1974.

In June 1949 he also spoke from the floor at the American Medical Association’s annual session in Atlantic City, in the discussion after a paper on bulbar polio; his remarks, printed in the published discussion and quoted by Landwehr, are covered on the virus-diseases page, and the B-vitamin papers on Klenner’s B-Vitamin Protocol.

Memberships

Klenner signed his 1971 paper “F.C.C.P.”, Fellow of the American College of Chest Physicians. According to Saul, he was also a Fellow of the American College of Angiology and of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, and one of the founders of the American Geriatrics Society; apart from the chest-physician fellowship, these memberships rest on Saul’s account alone.

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9. Final Years and Death (1984)

Klenner remained in Reidsville for the rest of his life. In the 1971 paper he wrote that he himself took 10 to 20 grams of sodium ascorbate a day by mouth — a personal habit he reported, not a regimen presented for others. In words quoted by Saul and by the Hall of Fame citation, he spoke of having used large doses of vitamins on more than 10,000 people over thirty years without seeing ill effects; that is his own claim, as reported.

He had long planned a book on vitamin therapy. A 1978 letter to him from Irwin Stone, quoted by Saul, regretted that the book was “still only a gleam in your eye,” and suggested that giving high levels of ascorbate for long periods was like creating a new human subspecies, “Homo sapiens ascorbicus.” The book was never written. Klenner had adopted Stone’s term “hypoascorbemia” for that inherited inability, an idea explained on Ascorbic Acid: The Natural Source and Science Behind Klenner’s Work.

He suffered from heart disease in his last years. According to the Find a Grave memorial, he had a heart attack at home on 19 May 1984 and died the next day, 20 May 1984, at Morehead Memorial Hospital in Eden, North Carolina, aged 76. Saul likewise records “the doctor’s death from heart disease in 1984.” He was buried in Greenview Cemetery in Reidsville.

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10. Remembered: The Clinical Guide and the Hall of Fame

Because Klenner never wrote his book, others gathered his work after his death. In 1988 the paediatrician Lendon H. Smith published Clinical Guide to the Use of Vitamin C: The Clinical Experiences of Frederick R. Klenner, M.D., a condensation of his papers. The foreword was by Linus Pauling, the two-time Nobel laureate who had championed vitamin C since 1970; as quoted by Saul and by the Find a Grave memorial, Pauling wrote: “The early papers by Dr. Fred R. Klenner provide much information about the use of large doses of vitamin C in preventing and treating many diseases. These papers are still important.” Smith himself, quoted by Saul, wrote that he had used Klenner’s methods on hundreds of patients and that “He is right.”

His ideas were carried forward by physicians in the orthomolecular tradition. Robert F. Cathcart developed Klenner’s practice of giving vitamin C by mouth “to tolerance” into his “bowel tolerance” method, published in 1981, and Thomas E. Levy drew on Klenner’s case reports in his 2002 book Curing the Incurable. In 2005 Klenner was inducted into the Orthomolecular Medicine Hall of Fame; its citation quotes the Canadian psychiatrist Abram Hoffer on the size of the doses Klenner used. Andrew W. Saul’s 2007 profile was titled “Hidden in Plain Sight.”

Modern reviewers of intravenous vitamin C cite him as the beginning of the story. Writing on sepsis in 2018, the critical-care physician Paul Marik opened his history with: “In 1949, Dr Fred Klenner from Reidsville, North Carolina, reported on the use of intravenous vitamin C in the treatment of polio and other viral illnesses.” Marik added that the early assumption that vitamin C killed viruses directly in the body was, in his view, mistaken. Patrick Holford and colleagues (2020) noted that “In 1951, Klenner investigated the effects of high doses of vitamin C, given intravenously, against viral diseases including pneumonia”, and Harri Hemilä’s 2017 review of vitamin C and infections cites his papers of 1948, 1951, 1954 and 1971. The trials of intravenous vitamin C that followed, and what they found, are described on Klenner’s B-Vitamin Protocol for Multiple Sclerosis and Myasthenia Gravis, whose final sections cover the later research, and on the Linus Pauling pages.

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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. Jungeblut CW. Inactivation of poliomyelitis virus in vitro by crystalline vitamin C (ascorbic acid). J Exp Med. 1935;62(4):517-21. PubMed PMID: 19870431
  7. Cathcart RF. Vitamin C, titrating to bowel tolerance, anascorbemia, and acute induced scurvy. Med Hypotheses. 1981;7(11):1359-76. PubMed PMID: 7321921
  8. Hemilä H. Vitamin C and Infections. Nutrients. 2017;9(4):339. PubMed PMID: 28353648
  9. 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
  10. Holford P, Carr AC, Jovic TH, Ali SR, Whitaker IS, Marik PE, Smith AD. Vitamin C-An Adjunctive Therapy for Respiratory Infection, Sepsis and COVID-19. Nutrients. 2020;12(12):3760. PubMed PMID: 33297491

PubMed Topic Searches

  1. Klenner FR — papers indexed in PubMed
  2. Vitamin C and poliomyelitis
  3. History of vitamin C therapy
  4. Intravenous ascorbic acid pharmacokinetics

Further Reading

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Connections