Vitamin C and the Virus Diseases: Klenner's Polio and Pneumonia Reports

Between 1948 and 1952 a country doctor in Reidsville, North Carolina, published a run of papers in the regional journal Southern Medicine and Surgery that made an unusual claim: that vitamin C, the same substance that prevents scurvy and is found in oranges, lemons and green peppers, could stop virus infections when it was given by injection in doses far larger than anyone had used before. Frederick R. Klenner described patients with virus pneumonia whose fever and chest X-rays cleared within days, and then, during the North Carolina polio epidemic of 1948, a series of sixty patients whom he reported as well within three to five days. He went on to describe the same approach in shingles, measles, mumps, chickenpox and encephalitis, and later in lockjaw, snakebite and spider bite.

This page tells that part of his story in the order it happened and, as far as possible, in his own words: the first injections in the early 1940s, the 1948 pneumonia paper, the monkey experiments of Claus Jungeblut and Albert Sabin that formed the scientific background he argued against, the 1949 polio series and exactly how he gave the injections, his other virus cases, his remarks at the American Medical Association meeting of June 1949, the later polio papers, his case reports of the 1950s, and the doses he described in 1971. The doses quoted here are historical record, attributed to Klenner and to the year he reported them; they are not instructions. His life, the science of ascorbic acid and his later B-vitamin work each have their own page in this wing.

Table of Contents

  1. Bleeding Gums and a Dying Man (Early 1940s)
  2. The 1948 Paper on Virus Pneumonia
  3. Jungeblut, Sabin and the Monkey Experiments
  4. The 1948 Polio Epidemic in Reidsville
  5. Sixty Cases: How Klenner Gave the Injections
  6. Shingles, Measles, Mumps and Encephalitis
  7. “None Will Be Paralyzed”: The AMA Session of June 1949
  8. Massage and the Later Polio Papers (1951–1952)
  9. Lockjaw, Snakebite and Other Case Reports
  10. Doses as Klenner Reported Them
  11. Key Research Papers
  12. Connections

1. Bleeding Gums and a Dying Man (Early 1940s)

By the early 1940s Klenner was in private practice in Reidsville, a town in Rockingham County, working from an office above a drug store with his wife Annie, a trained nurse, as his only assistant. He was a chest specialist by training but kept a general practice. Vitamin C had been identified as the anti-scurvy factor only about ten years earlier, and in American medicine it was regarded as a nutrient for preventing scurvy and little else.

According to Robert Landwehr’s 1991 account of Klenner’s work, the first step was a domestic one. Around 1942 Annie Klenner developed bleeding gums, the classic early sign of a shortage of vitamin C, and her husband treated her with injections of the vitamin. Soon afterwards he was called to a man who was close to death from virus pneumonia and who refused to go to hospital. Klenner gave him vitamin C by injection, and the man recovered.

Klenner told this story more than once, and the details shift with the telling. In a 1953 paper he dated the beginning plainly: “Our interest with vitamin C against the virus organism began ten years ago in a modest rural home” — that is, about 1943. In a newspaper interview in 1977, quoted by Andrew Saul, he remembered it more vividly: “I went to his house and gave him one big shot with five grams or 5,000 milligrams of vitamin C … I said then, well, my gosh! This is doing something.” The five-gram figure of the 1977 retelling is larger than the 1,000-milligram injections he described in his first paper in 1948, and the two accounts are best read side by side, each attached to its own date.

One further detail comes from the author biography printed with his 1971 paper: “The first massive doses of ascorbic acid he gave to himself.” Before he reported the method in print, in other words, he had tried large doses on his own body.

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2. The 1948 Paper on Virus Pneumonia

Klenner’s first published account appeared in February 1948 under the title “Virus pneumonia and its treatment with vitamin C.” It had been read by title to the Tri-State Medical Association (the physicians of the Carolinas and Virginia) at its meeting in Charleston, and it gathered his experience of 42 cases treated over a five-year period.

What he gave

He described giving 1,000 milligrams of vitamin C intravenously every six to twelve hours to adults, and 500 milligrams by intramuscular injection to infants. Most patients, he wrote, needed between three and seven injections. He reported that the fever fell by about two degrees Fahrenheit within hours of an injection and that the course ended in “complete clinical and x-ray response in all of our cases.” He also remarked that patients who had been given penicillin seemed to respond more slowly to the vitamin.

His careful wording

What stands out in the 1948 paper, compared with his later writing, is its caution. Klenner did not claim to know how the vitamin worked. In his words, “not sufficient evidence is on hand to state that it is a virus killer.” He presented the 42 cases as clinical observations from a general practice, not as a controlled trial, and the paper contains no untreated comparison group. Within eighteen months, after the polio epidemic of 1948, his language would become much more confident.

Pneumonia caused by viruses had no specific treatment at the time. Penicillin, which had entered civilian use only a few years earlier, acts on bacteria, not on viruses, and the antiviral drugs of later decades did not yet exist. That gap is the setting in which a general practitioner’s report on a vitamin was read. (The site’s Pneumonia page covers the disease itself.)

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3. Jungeblut, Sabin and the Monkey Experiments

Klenner did not come to vitamin C and polio from nowhere. In the 1930s the question had been studied in the laboratory, and he cited that work as his starting point.

Claus Jungeblut’s experiments (1935–1937)

Claus W. Jungeblut, a bacteriologist at Columbia University in New York, reported in 1935 that poliomyelitis virus mixed in the test tube with small amounts of crystalline vitamin C lost its ability to infect: when the treated virus was injected into the brains of rhesus monkeys, it did not cause disease. This was a laboratory inactivation of the virus outside the body, not a treatment of a sick animal.

In 1937 Jungeblut went further and tried vitamin C as a treatment and as a preventive in monkeys infected with polio. His published abstract gives the numbers: of 62 treated monkeys, 19 escaped paralysis, compared with 2 of 38 untreated controls. Within the treated animals the pattern was not simple. All ten monkeys given large doses, between 100 and 700 milligrams, became paralysed, while 16 of the 33 monkeys given 5 milligrams escaped. Given in advance as a preventive, vitamin C did not protect the animals. Jungeblut published two further papers on vitamin C therapy in experimental polio, in 1937 and 1939.

Albert Sabin’s negative result (1939)

In 1939 Albert B. Sabin, later famous for the oral polio vaccine, reported his own monkey experiments in the same journal. Sabin infected the animals by placing the virus in the nose, and found that neither natural nor synthetic vitamin C had any effect on the course of experimental polio. He wrote that he could find “no apparent explanation” for the difference between his results and Jungeblut’s. After Sabin’s report the laboratory interest in vitamin C as a polio treatment largely faded.

How Klenner read this work

In his 1949 paper Klenner credited Jungeblut as the forerunner of his own approach. He attributed the negative animal results, including Sabin’s, to doses that in his view were too small and given too infrequently: the vitamin, he argued, had to be given in large amounts and repeated every few hours to keep pace with the infection. Jungeblut’s own 1937 figures, in which the monkeys on the largest doses fared worst, point in a different direction from that argument; both are part of the record and are set out here as each man reported them.

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4. The 1948 Polio Epidemic in Reidsville

Poliomyelitis was the most feared childhood infection in mid-century America. Most infections caused only a mild illness, but in a minority the virus attacked the nerve cells of the spinal cord that control the muscles, leaving permanent paralysis, and in the “bulbar” form it attacked the brainstem centres for swallowing and breathing. Summer epidemics closed swimming pools and cinemas; there was no vaccine until the mid-1950s and no drug that acted on the virus.

In 1948 North Carolina had one of its worst epidemics. Klenner, as a physician in Reidsville, saw it at first hand. In his 1949 paper he wrote that during the epidemic “60 cases of this disease came under our care.” He treated them in his practice and in their homes with the injection method he had developed for virus pneumonia, adjusted to the faster course of polio.

The year matters for the story that followed. Klenner was treating these patients at the same time that the laboratory route to a polio vaccine was gathering pace: John Enders, Thomas Weller and Frederick Robbins published their method of growing polio virus in tissue culture in 1949, the work that later made the vaccines possible (their story is on the site’s Enders, Weller and Robbins page). Klenner’s vitamin C report and the vaccine research belong to the same years.

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5. Sixty Cases: How Klenner Gave the Injections

The paper that set out the polio series was published in July 1949 as “The treatment of poliomyelitis and other virus diseases with vitamin C.” It is the core document of Klenner’s reputation, and the details below are taken from it.

The method, as he described it

Klenner reported giving 1,000 to 2,000 milligrams of vitamin C by injection every two to four hours. The interval was guided by the patient’s temperature, which was taken rectally every two hours: the fever was his gauge of whether the infection was being held back. He described continuing this for 24 hours and then giving the injections every six hours for a further 48 hours. In the same paper he still sometimes used the older name for vitamin C, hexuronic acid, the term Albert Szent-Györgyi had used when he isolated the substance in 1928.

Diagnosis and the 15 spinal taps

Of the 60 patients, Klenner wrote, the diagnosis was confirmed by lumbar puncture (spinal tap) in 15. He explained in the paper why routine lumbar puncture was not done in the others. Doing so, he wrote, “would have made it obligatory to report each case as diagnosed to the health authorities,” which “would have deprived myself of valuable clinical material and the patients of most valuable therapy.” Polio was a notifiable disease, and reported cases came under the control of the public-health authorities. The diagnosis in the remaining 45 patients rested on his clinical judgement.

The bulbar cases

Two of the patients, he reported, had the bulbar form, in which the virus reaches the brainstem. In these two he described supportive measures in addition to the injections: postural drainage to keep secretions out of the airway, and oxygen.

The results, in his words

Klenner’s summary was unequivocal. “All patients were clinically well after 72 hours,” he wrote, and “every patient of this series recovered uneventfully within three to five days.” The series was a general practitioner’s clinical report: it had no untreated comparison group, and, as noted above, laboratory confirmation existed for 15 of the 60 patients. Those are facts of the paper as he published it.

The same paper reported a safety observation of his own: 200 consecutive hospital patients given 500 to 1,000 milligrams of vitamin C every four to six hours, in whom, he wrote, no toxic reactions were seen.

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6. Shingles, Measles, Mumps and Encephalitis

The 1949 paper was titled “poliomyelitis and other virus diseases,” and much of it reports Klenner’s experience with other infections treated the same way. As with polio, each set of cases is described as he gave it.

Shingles and cold sores

He described eight cases of herpes zoster (shingles), the painful blistering rash caused by reactivation of the chickenpox virus among the cases treated with vitamin C injections. He also described its use in herpes simplex, the virus of cold sores.

Measles, observed in his own daughters

Klenner wrote about measles both as treatment and as prevention. His closest observations came from his own family. “These ‘research helpers’ were my own little daughters,” he wrote, and he described following the course of measles in his two young daughters over a period of 30 days while they received vitamin C. The site’s Measles page covers the disease.

Mumps, chickenpox and influenza

He reported 33 cases of mumps and described chickenpox and influenza among the infections he had treated with the injections.

Virus encephalitis

Six cases of virus encephalitis, an infection of the brain, appear in the paper. Encephalitis was among the most dangerous of the conditions he described, and like polio it is an infection of the nervous system.

Across all these infections the 1949 paper shows a change of tone from 1948. Where the pneumonia paper had declined to call vitamin C a virus killer, the polio paper treats it as an antiviral agent that, given in large enough and frequent enough doses, would bring virus infections to an end within days.

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7. “None Will Be Paralyzed”: The AMA Session of June 1949

Klenner took his claim to a national audience the month before the polio paper appeared. At the Annual Session of the American Medical Association in Atlantic City, on 10 June 1949, a paper on bulbar poliomyelitis was followed by an open discussion, and Klenner rose to speak. His remarks were printed in the discussion abstract in the Journal of the American Medical Association; as recorded there and quoted by Landwehr, he said:

“In the past seven years, virus infections have been treated and cured in a period of seventy-two hours by the employment of massive frequent injections of ascorbic acid, or vitamin C. I believe that if vitamin C in these massive doses — 6,000 to 20,000 mg in a twenty-four hour period — is given to these patients with poliomyelitis none will be paralyzed and there will be no further maiming or epidemics of poliomyelitis.”

“The past seven years” places the start of his work at about 1942, consistent with Landwehr’s date for the first injections. The figure of 6,000 to 20,000 milligrams a day was the total that his schedule of repeated injections produced over twenty-four hours.

According to Landwehr, none of the speakers who followed Klenner in that discussion referred to his remarks. Landwehr, an advocate of Klenner’s work, made this silence the centrepiece of his 1991 article, which he titled “The Origin of the 42-Year Stonewall of Vitamin C.”

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8. Massage and the Later Polio Papers (1951–1952)

Klenner returned to the subject in two more papers in Southern Medicine and Surgery, the last of his work to be indexed in the medical literature database that became PubMed.

“Massive doses of vitamin C and the virus diseases” (1951)

The 1951 paper extended his account of the virus diseases treated with large doses. It is one of the papers later reviewers cite when they trace intravenous vitamin C back to its origins: a 2020 review in Nutrients by Holford and colleagues names it as the point at which Klenner investigated high intravenous doses against viral diseases including pneumonia, and Harri Hemilä’s 2017 review of vitamin C and infections lists it among his papers. Thomas Levy, a later writer on Klenner’s methods quoted by Andrew Saul, describes a case from this period: a five-year-old girl with paralysed legs who, according to that account, recovered under vitamin C injections combined with massage.

“The vitamin and massage treatment for acute poliomyelitis” (1952)

As its title states, the 1952 paper joined the vitamin injections to massage of the affected limbs in acute polio. Massage, warm packs and physical therapy were already part of polio care at the time — the Australian nurse Elizabeth Kenny had made hot packs and muscle re-education famous in the 1940s — and Klenner’s paper described combining that hands-on care with his vitamin regime. It was his last paper in a MEDLINE-indexed journal; his later work appeared in the Tri-State Medical Journal and the Journal of Applied Nutrition, neither of which PubMed indexes.

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9. Lockjaw, Snakebite and Other Case Reports

Through the 1950s Klenner kept publishing short reports in the Tri-State Medical Journal. Their titles, as listed in Andrew Saul’s 2007 bibliography, show how widely he applied the injections beyond virus infections. These papers have not been read for this page; what follows is drawn from their titles and from the secondary accounts.

In these papers Klenner was treating toxins and venoms, not only viruses, and by 1971 he described vitamin C as acting against poisons generally (see the next section and the wing’s ascorbic acid science page for his explanation).

A later look at tetanus

The tetanus question was later taken up by systematic reviewers. A 2013 Cochrane review by Hemilä and Koivula found a single relevant trial, non-randomised, from Bangladesh, in which 117 patients with tetanus were given 1 gram of vitamin C a day intravenously alongside standard care; case fatality was lower in the vitamin C group, and the reviewers rated the quality of that evidence as low.

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10. Doses as Klenner Reported Them

The amounts of vitamin C Klenner described grew steadily over three decades. Each figure below is attached to the year and paper in which he reported it; together they are a historical record of what he wrote, not a schedule.

The form of the vitamin matters for reading these numbers. Robert Cathcart, in a note printed with a transcription of the 1971 paper, states that the “ascorbic acid” Klenner injected was in fact sodium ascorbate, the neutral salt of the vitamin, made up by Annie Klenner. Abram Hoffer, as quoted in the 2005 Orthomolecular Medicine Hall of Fame citation, wrote that Klenner used up to 100 grams a day.

The 1971 paper also contains Klenner’s dismissal of the kidney-stone concern about large doses as “a myth,” and his reports on vitamin C in pregnancy; the science of absorption, injection and reported hazards is set out on the wing’s Ascorbic Acid page, and his life on the Life and Career page. The vitamin itself, its food sources and its everyday roles are covered on the site’s Vitamin C page.

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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. Massive doses of vitamin C and the virus diseases. South Med Surg. 1951;113(4):101-7. PubMed PMID: 14855098
  4. Klenner FR. The vitamin and massage treatment for acute poliomyelitis. South Med Surg. 1952;114(8):194-7. PubMed PMID: 12984224
  5. 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
  6. Jungeblut CW. Vitamin C therapy and prophylaxis in experimental poliomyelitis. J Exp Med. 1937;65(1):127-46. PubMed PMID: 19870585
  7. Jungeblut CW. Further observations on vitamin C therapy in experimental poliomyelitis. J Exp Med. 1937;66(4):459-77. PubMed PMID: 19870677
  8. Jungeblut CW. A further contribution to vitamin C therapy in experimental poliomyelitis. J Exp Med. 1939;70(3):315-32. PubMed PMID: 19870912
  9. Sabin AB. Vitamin C in relation to experimental poliomyelitis: with incidental observations on certain manifestations in Macacus rhesus monkeys on a scorbutic diet. J Exp Med. 1939;69(4):507-16. PubMed PMID: 19870860
  10. Hemilä H. Vitamin C and Infections. Nutrients. 2017;9(4):339. PubMed PMID: 28353648
  11. 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
  12. Hemilä H, Koivula T. Vitamin C for preventing and treating tetanus. Cochrane Database Syst Rev. 2013;2013(11):CD006665. PubMed PMID: 24226506

PubMed Topic Searches

  1. https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/?term=Klenner+FR%5Bau%5D
  2. https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/?term=vitamin+C+poliomyelitis
  3. https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/?term=ascorbic+acid+viral+infection+intravenous
  4. https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/?term=vitamin+C+tetanus

Further Reading

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Connections