Max Bircher-Benner: Books, Successors and Legacy

Table of Contents

1. His Books in Date Order
2. The First Books, 1900–1924
3. Früchtespeisen und Rohgemüse, the Raw-Food Cookbook
4. Der Wendepunkt, the Journal He Founded
5. The Later Books and the 1933 London Address
6. The Family Who Carried On
7. Werner Kollath and the Whole-Food Idea
8. Sweden: Waerland as Rival, Not Follower
9. The Gerson–Herrmannsdorfer–Sauerbruch Diet
10. Ordnungstherapie and Muesli: Two Lasting Legacies
11. The Zurich Archive and Where to Read Him Today
12. Key Research Papers
13. Connections
14. Featured Videos

1. His Books in Date Order

The list below gives his main works with the exact German titles as the German Wikipedia article, the Neue Deutsche Biographie and the historians print them. Sections 2 to 5 describe what each one argued.

Two of these dates need a note. The year of the first German edition of Früchtespeisen und Rohgemüse is not settled in the sources (section 3). The book on children’s nutrition is known here only from its 1935 Swedish edition, which Eklöf records; its exact German title was not confirmed for this page.

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2. The First Books, 1900–1924

The 1900 paper. Bircher-Benner first set out his theory before the medical society of Zurich in 1900, and the lecture was printed as “Erste Mitteilung über eine neue Ernährungslehre” (“First report on a new theory of nutrition”) in the Correspondenz-Blatt für Schweizer Ärzte. His colleagues held that he had left the domain of science; his son Ralph later called the episode an “excommunication”. The story of that evening is told on The Raw Apple Cure.

Kurze Grundzüge der Ernährungs-Therapie auf Grund der Energie-Spannung der Nahrung (Berlin, 1903). This was the first book on his theory of nutrition, and Eklöf notes that it was soon translated into other languages. Its title states the argument: food should be judged by its “energy tension”, the living energy it carries, and not only by its calories and chemical parts. Around 1900, as the Historisches Lexikon der Schweiz puts it, he was already ranking foods by their “living” solar-energy content, with raw plant food at the top. The Neue Deutsche Biographie gives a shorter title, Grundzüge der Ernährungstherapie, and records a fourth edition in 1925. The full theory is on Sunlight Food: Bircher-Benner’s Theory of Food as Stored Sunlight.

Die Grundlagen unserer Ernährung (Berlin, 1921). “The foundations of our nutrition”; the sources consulted for this page list it without describing its contents.

Eine neue Ernährungslehre (Zurich, Wendepunkt, 1924; fourth edition 1928). “A new theory of nutrition” took up the very words of the rejected 1900 paper and presented the theory to the general reader. The teaching, as Meyer-Renschhausen and Wirz summarise it, was that food is stored sunlight; that every transformation loses energy, so that raw food stands above cooked and plant food above animal food; and that green leaves are the “key to the whole mystery of nutrition”. It went through four editions in four years.

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3. Früchtespeisen und Rohgemüse, the Raw-Food Cookbook

Früchtespeisen und Rohgemüse (“Fruit dishes and raw vegetables”) was the practical book of the raw-food therapy, written with his son, the physician Max Edwin Bircher, and published by the Wendepunkt house in Zurich. It had reached its tenth edition by 1929, and that edition prints the original muesli recipe on pages 22–23. It is also the book in which he gave raw food its name of honour, Sonnenlichtspeisen (“sunlight foods”): pure foods “denatured neither by heat nor by leaching”, as a Vienna library leaflet quotes the passage.

The first German edition’s year is not settled. Eklöf records that the book, which she spells Früchtespeise und Rohgemüse, was noticed as a “new book” in the Swedish press and in the Swedish vegetarian journal in 1928, and that it appeared in Swedish three years later as Råkost och fruktdiet för friska och sjuka (“Raw food and fruit diet for the healthy and the sick”). One of her notes dates the book to 1924 and cites the Swedish translation in its second edition, Stockholm 1931. According to Ralph Bircher, whom she cites, the book was translated into ten languages besides Swedish.

In English it was Fruit Dishes and Raw Vegetables. In 1933 the Food Education Society in London sold it as “containing practical instruction in the preparation of a raw and a mixed diet” and “an established favourite upon the society’s stalls”. In his London address Bircher-Benner pointed to it for anyone who needed to know how to prepare a raw diet “in view of the defective powers of mastication, so general nowadays”. A later English edition, The Bircher-Benner Raw Fruits and Vegetables Book, was published in the United States in 1977 under the names of Max Edwin Bircher and his father.

Two more cookbooks came from the clinic kitchen, both by his sisters: Alice Bircher’s Diätetische Speisezettel und fleischlose Kochrezepte (“Dietetic menus and meatless recipes”, 1906) and Berta Brupbacher-Bircher’s Wendepunkt-Kochbuch (1927). In 1933 the Food Education Society hoped to publish an English edition of her recipe book, with an introduction by her brother. The recipe itself is on The Original Bircher Muesli.

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4. Der Wendepunkt, the Journal He Founded

In 1923 Bircher-Benner founded the monthly Der Wendepunkt im Leben und im Leiden (“The turning point in life and in suffering”), and his books came out from the Wendepunkt publishing house in Zurich. The German Wikipedia article gives its history in detail:

• Editors. Martha Bircher-Müller, the wife of his son Max Edwin, edited it in 1925–1926; his wife Elisabeth Bircher-Benner from 1927 to 1932; and his son Ralph Bircher from 1932 to 1978. From 1953 his niece Dagmar Liechti-von Brasch was co-editor.
• Readers. From about 1,000 subscribers at the start it grew to 6,000 by 1930, fell during the crisis years of the 1930s, rose again from 1938, and reached about 8,000 in 1944, probably its peak.
• His own pen. By far the largest share of the monthly articles came from Bircher-Benner himself. He also ran the popular “Fragen und Antworten” (“Questions and Answers”) column and answered some 2,000 letters there before his death in 1939.
• Other writers. Contributors included the psychoanalyst Wilhelm Stekel, the naturopaths Alfred Brauchle and Werner Zabel, and Werner Kollath, who for a time had his own column (section 7).

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5. The Later Books and the 1933 London Address

Der Menschenseele Not. Erkrankung und Gesundung (vol. I 1927, vol. II 1933). “The distress of the human soul: illness and recovery” is his work on the mind in illness. In it, the German Wikipedia article records, he defended the “mneme” theory of the Jena zoologist Richard Semon, which held that acquired characteristics can be inherited, and appealed to his teacher Auguste Forel.

Ernährungskrankheiten, parts 1 and 2 (1928). As its title says (“Diseases of nutrition”), a two-part work on the illnesses of nutrition, published by the Wendepunkt house.

Food Science for All and a New Sunlight Theory of Nutrition (London, 1928). A series of lectures to teachers of domestic economy, translated from the German. With Fruit Dishes and Raw Vegetables, it was one of the “two small books” of his that existed in English by 1933.

The Prevention of Disease by Correct Feeding (London, 1933). On 6 January 1933 he addressed the Food Education Society at its conference in University College London. The printed address is the clearest statement of his teaching in his own English words. He called food “accumulated sunshine stored up in the vegetable kingdom”, sorted foods into three classes of “light accumulators” with raw plant food first, and listed the illnesses he said the diet helped, from chronic constipation (which, he said, disappeared “in 95 per cent. of cases” within five days to four weeks) to migraine and hay fever. The pamphlet’s front matter records that his works had been translated into French, Italian, Russian, Danish, Swedish, Dutch and Polish, that a medical institute named “Les Forces Vives” had been founded in Paris to carry out his teaching, and that he had recently spoken to 400 doctors at Hamburg. The address is described in full on Bircher-Benner’s Raw Food (Rohkost) Therapy.

“Vegetabile Heilkost” (1933). “Vegetable healing diet” was a 60-page chapter (pp. 109–168) in the clinical handbook Neue Deutsche Klinik. The editor, Georg Klemperer, added a note explaining that he had invited him because he valued him as “einen sehr verdienstvollen Reformator der Krankendiätetik” (“a most meritorious reformer of the diet of the sick”), while adding that in this field practice had run ahead of its scientific explanations.

Diätetische Heilbehandlung: Erfahrungen und Perspektiven (Stuttgart, 1935). “Dietetic healing treatment: experience and perspectives”, a book on treatment by diet drawn, as its subtitle says, from experience.

Vom Wesen und der Organisation der Nahrungsenergie (Stuttgart, 1936). The full title continues “… und über die Anwendung des zweiten Hauptsatzes der Energielehre auf den Nährwert und die Nahrungswirkung”: on applying the second law of thermodynamics to the value and action of food. This is his fullest statement of the energy theory. It appeared in London in 1939, the year of his death, as The Essential Nature and Organisation of Food Energy and the Application of the Second Principle of Thermo-dynamics to Food Value and Its Active Force.

Ordnungsgesetze des Lebens (1938). “Laws of order of life” prints three lectures he prepared for the Food Education Society. It sets out his Ordnungstherapie, the rules of order for nutrition, the skin, breathing, movement, rhythm of life and the mind (section 10). It was reprinted in German in 1992 and again in 2014.

Vom Werden des neuen Arztes: Erkenntnisse und Bekenntnisse (Dresden, 1938). “On the making of the new doctor: insights and confessions” is his autobiographical book, his own account of how he became the physician he was.

Die Verhütung des Unheilbaren. “The prevention of the incurable”, published by the Wendepunkt house; the sources do not give its year.

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6. The Family Who Carried On

Bircher-Benner and his wife Elisabeth Benner (1872–1945) had seven children. Several of them, a son-in-law and a niece kept his clinic, journal and books going for decades. The German Wikipedia article and the University of Zurich archive list give these details:

• Max Edwin Bircher (1895–1977), physician. His father sent him to the Battle Creek sanatorium of the physician John Harvey Kellogg; after further work in the United States he joined the Lebendige Kraft sanatorium from 1922 to 1929, before opening his own practice in Zurich and later his own sanatorium at Oberwil on Lake Zug. He was co-author of Früchtespeisen und Rohgemüse.
• Franklin Bircher-Rey (1896–1988), physician, trained in psychoanalysis; at the sanatorium from 1929 and its chief physician from 1939 to 1942. He lectured at the Sorbonne on nutrition in the prevention and treatment of disease.
• Willy Bircher (1898–1970), physician, trained in psychotherapy with Wilhelm Stekel in Vienna; at the sanatorium from 1924 and its head for several years. The Zurich archive records him as chief physician.
• Ralph Bircher (1899–1990), economist, who wrote a dissertation on Swiss alpine farming. He edited Der Wendepunkt from 1932 to 1978, co-owned the family publishing house, and became the main keeper of his father’s story (see below).
• Ruth Kunz-Bircher (1902–1997), a concert violinist, whom the German Wikipedia article names as head of the private clinic’s management from 1945. She later wrote the Bircher-Benner health guide. Her husband, Alfred Kunz-Bircher, a chemist, headed the clinic’s chemical and clinical laboratory from 1931, according to the same article.
• Dagmar Liechti-von Brasch (1911–1993), his niece, daughter of his sister Alice, who joined the household in 1911. She became an assistant physician in 1939 and was the clinic’s chief physician for several decades from the 1940s (the sources give her years in charge as 1942–1973 or 1947–1980). A biography of her by Marina Widmer and Kathrin Barbara Zatti appeared in Zurich in 2008.

In June 1939, five months after his death, a Volkssanatorium für Ordnungstherapie (“people’s sanatorium for order therapy”) opened on the Zürichberg, paid for by a private donation of one million francs, with room for 45 to 48 guests at lower prices than the private clinic; his sons Max Edwin, Franklin and Willy led it at first. The private sanatorium itself was renamed the Bircher-Benner clinic, passed to the Canton of Zurich in 1973, and closed in 1994. Its history is on The Lebendige Kraft Sanatorium in Zurich (1904–1994).

Bircher-Benner publications after him

• The clinic’s papers. In the medical journal Hippokrates, A. Kunz-Bircher and Dagmar Liechti-von Brasch published “Clinical significance of fresh food” (1956) and “Cholesterol metabolism and arteriosclerosis” (1957), and Liechti-von Brasch wrote on correcting nutrition and habits in pregnancy (1963). The papers are signed “A. Kunz-Bircher”; the sources fetched for this page do not say which member of the family that was.
• Reprints of his own words. In 1948 a vegetarian journal reprinted his text “Why natural food?”, with an article on “Dr. Bircher-Benner’s diet” by M. W. Koning in the same issue.
• The family publishing house. In 1953 Ralph Bircher and a Frankfurt publisher founded a publishing house bearing the family name in Bad Homburg, which took over Der Wendepunkt and kept his books in print, among them the 1992 reprint of Ordnungsgesetze des Lebens.
• Ralph Bircher’s biography. Leben und Lebenswerk Bircher-Benners (“The life and life’s work of Bircher-Benner”), Zurich 1959, subtitled in Eklöf’s citation “Bahnbrecher der Ernährungslehre und Heilkunde” (“pioneer of nutrition and medicine”); second edition 1989. Ralph was also the source of the muesli’s origin story, which he told in a Zurich newspaper in 1944.
• The clinic handbooks. A series of diet handbooks with menus and recipes for particular complaints, by the clinic’s doctors and staff, several of them edited by Ralph Bircher, appeared in English in 1972 (on headache and migraine, on raw food and juices, on digestive problems, and on liver and gallbladder problems, followed in 1976 by one on arthritis and rheumatism) and in Swedish between 1979 and 1982.
• The health guide. Ruth Kunz-Bircher’s guide appeared in Swedish in 1980 and in English as The Bircher-Benner Health Guide (London, 1981), translated from the French Le guide de santé Bircher. Its Swedish back cover called Bircher-Benner “the father of health food”.

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7. Werner Kollath and the Whole-Food Idea

The German bacteriologist and food scientist Werner Kollath (1892–1970) is regarded as a pioneer of Vollwertkost (“full-value food”, usually rendered “whole food”). In his main book, Die Ordnung unserer Nahrung (“The order of our food”, 1942), he used the word Vollwertkost, and, as the historian Jörg Melzer’s 2003 study is summarised, for the food concept itself “he resorted mainly to Maximilian Bircher-Benner’s publications”. Kollath ranked foods by how little they had been processed, rated plants above animals and raw above cooked, and called unprocessed food living and highly processed food “dead”, an echo of Bircher-Benner’s own ranking.

The link was personal as well as intellectual. Kollath wrote for Der Wendepunkt and for a time had his own column there, “Kollath-Worte” (“Kollath’s words”). After the war he published “The whole food and its determination by growth and cell replacement” (1947), the theme of his 1950 book Der Vollwert der Nahrung. In 1950 E. Ingber, writing on radiology in preventive medicine, described the X-ray signs of what he called a clinical “Bircher-Benner syndrome” beside a “mesotrophic Kollath syndrome”, placing the two men side by side. The Swedish physician Karl-Otto Aly later named Kollath and Bircher-Benner among the main sources of biological medicine in Sweden.

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8. Sweden: Waerland as Rival, Not Follower

Motzi Eklöf’s study in the Swedish history-of-science yearbook Lychnos (2005) follows Bircher-Benner’s reception in Sweden. Swedish women vegetarians brought him there first: his name appears in the journal Vegetarianen in 1914, when a lecture on his sunlight theory was reported. His cookbook was noticed in 1928 and translated in 1931, his book on children’s nutrition followed in 1935, and Swedes became the third-largest nationality among his patients (Eklöf, 2008).

From 1935 the Swedish health-food scene came to be dominated by Are Waerland, who was Bircher-Benner’s contemporary, not his disciple. Waerland had his own programme, including kruska, a coarse porridge of crushed oats and wheat bran, and urged a more consistent use of raw food than the vegetarians, who did not object to cooked vegetables. The Swedish vegetarian society stressed that Waerland never belonged to it; its authorities were rather physicians such as Bircher-Benner or Hindhede. Yet the two lines also met. The Swedish frisksport (“healthy sport”) magazines printed Bircher-Benner’s dietary advice beside Waerland’s, and in 1948 both the vegetarians and the frisksport movement invited Ralph Bircher to lecture in Sweden. In 1947 a W. Bircher wrote an article in a German health journal on “Are Waerland and Dr. Bircher-Benner”.

Eklöf records that the post-war Swedish health homes were said to rest mainly on the principles Waerland developed from the mid-1930s. One of them, however, was led for many years by Dr. Karl-Otto Aly, who had found Bircher-Benner through Der Wendepunkt, trained briefly at the Bircher-Benner clinic in Zurich in the early 1970s, and served a diet he described as strongly Bircher-Benner-inspired. In his forewords to the Swedish clinic handbooks Aly explained how the German, Bircher-Benner-inspired tradition differed from the Swedish movement founded by Waerland, which rejected, for example, eggs, salt and spices.

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9. The Gerson–Herrmannsdorfer–Sauerbruch Diet

In the early 1930s the diet named after Max Gerson, the surgeon Ferdinand Sauerbruch and Adolf Herrmannsdorfer, used above all against tuberculosis of the skin, was the other well-known salt-poor diet in the German-speaking world. In his London address of January 1933, after listing the illnesses he said his own diet helped and noting that “the favourable influence of this diet is also evident in tuberculous diseases”, Bircher-Benner wrote one sentence about it:

“A similar basis underlies the Gerson-Herrmannsdorfer-Sauerbruch diet.”

That is all he is recorded as saying in the sources fetched for this page. No source was found showing that Bircher-Benner influenced Gerson, or the other way round; the two are best read as contemporaries who reached related diets.

Others compared the two at the time. A 1931 doctoral dissertation at the University of Giessen by Gertrud Haupt, Bircher-Benner-Diät und Sauerbruch-Herrmannsdorfer-Gerson-Diät, opens by noting that the S-H-G diet healed tuberculous skin lesions, usually only after 7, 9 or 12 months, and asks whether Bircher-Benner’s method might be put into the treatment plan of lupus patients instead. Both methods, she writes, avoid common salt and both stress raw plant food; but the S-H-G diet was neither raw nor vegetarian, being a mixed diet that included milk, butter, eggs, meat, offal and fish. Gerson’s own work is on Dr. Max Gerson and the Gerson Therapy.

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10. Ordnungstherapie and Muesli: Two Lasting Legacies

Ordnungstherapie in German naturopathy. In 1937 Bircher-Benner introduced Ordnungstherapie as an umbrella term for his whole system: health is order and harmony in the body, the mind, the surroundings and the course of the day, and illness follows disorder. Jörg Melzer, Dieter Melchart and Reinhard Saller (2004) showed that the term and its definition are his, although it is often credited to the priest and water-cure pioneer Sebastian Kneipp. Today, they write, Ordnungstherapie is one of the five therapies that define naturopathy in German-language medical textbooks, beside diet, hydrotherapy, exercise therapy and herbal medicine; its listing as one of the five “pillars” of Kneipp therapy was made only by Kneipp physicians in the middle of the twentieth century. See Ordnungstherapie: Bircher-Benner’s Laws of Order for Health and Hydrotherapy.

Muesli around the world. His best-known legacy is the dish he called d’Spys (Swiss German, “the dish”) or Apfeldiätspeise (“apple diet dish”), introduced around 1900 and served at the start of meals in his clinic. In his recipe the apple, grated whole, was the main ingredient and the oats only a tablespoon. Meyer-Renschhausen and Wirz note that the muesli became popular only as its cereal and sugar content rose. Today muesli is eaten far beyond Switzerland, mostly in forms richer in grain than his. The original recipe and its history are on The Original Bircher Muesli (“d’Spys”) Recipe and History.

His place in the history of vegetarian nutrition. The nutrition scientist Claus Leitzmann (2014), reviewing the past, present and future of vegetarian nutrition, lists Bircher-Benner among its prominent figures, beside Sylvester Graham and John Harvey Kellogg.

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11. The Zurich Archive and Where to Read Him Today

The archive. Bircher-Benner’s papers (Nachlass), together with documents and photographs of the Bircher-Benner clinic from 1891 to 1969, are held at the Archiv für Medizingeschichte (Archive for the History of Medicine) of the Institute of Biomedical Ethics and History of Medicine at the University of Zurich. The patient files are closed for 120 years. The clinic’s guest book for 1904–1939, which Eklöf used to count the Swedish patients, is kept in the same Bircher-Benner archive.

Online copies. The Internet Archive holds the following, checked for this page:

• The Prevention of Disease by Correct Feeding (London, 1933), the Wellcome Library copy, free to read in full: archive.org/details/b33426624.
• Gertrud Haupt’s 1931 Giessen dissertation comparing his diet with the Gerson–Herrmannsdorfer–Sauerbruch diet, free to read: archive.org/details/IA40154005_0098.
• Food Science for All and a New Sunlight Theory of Nutrition (London, 1928), Wellcome Library copy, restricted access: archive.org/details/b29807244.
• The Essential Nature and Organisation of Food Energy (London, 1939), Wellcome Library copy, restricted access: archive.org/details/b29807232.
• The Bircher-Benner Raw Fruits and Vegetables Book (1977), borrowable: archive.org/details/bircherbennerraw00maxe.
• The Bircher-Benner Health Guide by Ruth Kunz-Bircher (1981), borrowable: archive.org/details/bircherbennerhea0000kunz.

Restricted and borrowable copies are read through the Internet Archive’s lending service. In German, Ordnungsgesetze des Lebens has been reprinted twice (1992, 2014). Most of the other German books survive in libraries; the sources found for this page do not show free online copies of them.

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Key Research Papers

1. Meyer-Renschhausen E, Wirz A. Dietetics, health reform and social order: vegetarianism as a moral physiology. The example of Maximilian Bircher-Benner (1867-1939). Med Hist. 1999;43(3):323-41. — PubMed PMID: 10885127
2. Melzer J, Melchart D, Saller R. [Development of ‘Ordnungstherapie’ by Bircher-Benner in naturopathy of the 20th century]. Forsch Komplementarmed Klass Naturheilkd. 2004;11(5):293-303. — PubMed PMID: 15572870
3. Eklöf M. [They searched help across the borders. Patients from Sweden in Switzerland at Dr Bircher-Benner’s health resort in 1928-1939]. Lakartidningen. 2008;105(3):147-50. — PubMed PMID: 18290517
4. Bircher W. [Are Waerland and Dr. Bircher-Benner]. Volksgesundheit Bad Hombg. 1947;40(7):235-7. — PubMed PMID: 20258547
5. Kollath W. [The whole food and its determination by growth and cell replacement]. Z Gesamte Inn Med. 1947;2(1-2):31-6. — PubMed PMID: 20254358
6. Ingber E. [Radiology applied to preventive medicine; the radiological equivalents of the clinical Bircher-Benner syndrome, the bradytrophic Bouchardat-Grote-Gaethgens syndrome and the mesotrophic Kollath syndrome; the concept of capillary pathology]. Dia Med. 1950;22(15):549-52. — PubMed PMID: 15414739
7. Bircher-Benner MO. [Why natural food?]. Veg Bode. 1948;51(9):132-4. — PubMed PMID: 18099596 (posthumous reprint of his text)
8. Koning MW. [Dr. Bircher-Benner’s diet]. Veg Bode. 1948;51(9):137-40. — PubMed PMID: 18099597
9. Kunz-Bircher A, Liechti-von Brasch D. [Clinical significance of fresh food]. Hippokrates. 1956;27(22):705-13. — PubMed PMID: 13384929
10. Kunz-Bircher A, Liechti-von Brasch D. [Cholesterin metabolism and arteriosclerosis]. Hippokrates. 1957;28(12):368-73. — PubMed PMID: 13448620
11. Liechti von Brasch D. [Correction of nutrition and habits in pregnancy; the complications of pregnancy]. Munch Med Wochenschr. 1963;105:1565-71. — PubMed PMID: 13930559
12. Leitzmann C. Vegetarian nutrition: past, present, future. Am J Clin Nutr. 2014;100 Suppl 1:496S-502S. — PubMed PMID: 24898226

PubMed Topic Searches

1. https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/?term=Bircher-Benner
2. https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/?term=Ordnungstherapie
3. https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/?term=Kollath+W%5BAuthor%5D
4. https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/?term=history+of+vegetarianism

Further Reading

• Bircher-Benner MO. The Prevention of Disease by Correct Feeding. Address to the Food Education Society, University College London, 6 January 1933. London: Food Education Society; 1933. — archive.org
• Bircher-Benner M. Erste Mitteilung über eine neue Ernährungslehre [First report on a new theory of nutrition]. Correspondenz-Blatt für Schweizer Ärzte. 1900;30(12):382.
• Eklöf M. Vegetarisk (rå)kost och det reformerade livet: Maximilian Bircher-Benner och de svenska hälsokoströrelserna [Vegetarian (raw) food and the reformed life: Maximilian Bircher-Benner and the Swedish health-food movements]. Lychnos. 2005. — tidskriftenlychnos.se
• Haupt G. Bircher-Benner-Diät und Sauerbruch-Herrmannsdorfer-Gerson-Diät [Bircher-Benner diet and Sauerbruch-Herrmannsdorfer-Gerson diet]. Medical dissertation, University of Giessen; 1931. — archive.org
• Bircher R. Leben und Lebenswerk Bircher-Benners [The life and life’s work of Bircher-Benner]. Zurich; 1959. 2nd ed. 1989.
• Jagella-Danoth C. Bircher-Benner, Maximilian Oskar. Historisches Lexikon der Schweiz, 1999 (edited 2010). — hls-dhs-dss.ch
• Friedli P. Bircher-Benner, Maximilian. Neue Deutsche Biographie 2 (1955). — deutsche-biographie.de
• Archiv für Medizingeschichte, Institute of Biomedical Ethics and History of Medicine, University of Zurich. Holdings list (Bestände). — ibme.uzh.ch (PDF)

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Connections

• Dr. Max Bircher-Benner and the Raw Food Cure
• Life and Career
• The Raw Apple Cure
• Sunlight Food Theory
• Raw Food (Rohkost) Therapy
• The Original Bircher Muesli
• Ordnungstherapie (Order Therapy)
• The Lebendige Kraft Sanatorium
• Max Gerson
• Weston A. Price
• Hydrotherapy
• Apples
• Oats
• Nutrition and Orthomolecular Medicine

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