Max Bircher-Benner: Life and Career

Maximilian Oskar Bircher-Benner (August 22, 1867 – January 24, 1939) was a Swiss physician who spent his working life in Zurich and became the best-known European champion of raw food as medicine. He called his method Rohkost (“raw food”) therapy, built a theory of food as stored sunlight to explain it, invented the apple dish the world now knows as Bircher muesli, and ran the sanatorium Lebendige Kraft (“vital force”) on the Zürichberg, the wooded hill above the city, from 1904 until his death.

This page tells his life in plain language and in date order: a childhood in Aarau that ended in family poverty, medical studies in Zurich and Berlin, a first practice in a working-class district, the illness and the raw apple that he said changed his thinking, the lecture that turned his colleagues against him, the sanatorium that drew patients from across Europe, the books and the journal through which he reached the public, and the family that carried his clinic on for more than half a century after he died. The facts come from the Historisches Lexikon der Schweiz (Historical Dictionary of Switzerland), the Neue Deutsche Biographie, the historians Elisabeth Meyer-Renschhausen and Albert Wirz (Medical History, 1999) and Motzi Eklöf (Lychnos, 2005), and his own 1933 London address. Where these sources disagree on a date, the page says so.

Table of Contents

  1. A Childhood in Aarau
  2. Medical Studies in Zurich and Berlin
  3. The Aussersihl Practice and Marriage
  4. The Raw Apple and the 1895 Patient
  5. The Private Clinic of 1897
  6. The 1900 Lecture and the Doctors’ Rejection
  7. The Lebendige Kraft Sanatorium (1904)
  8. Books, a Journal and the 1927 Honour
  9. London 1933 and the Laws of Order
  10. Death in 1939 and the Family That Carried On
  11. Timeline
  12. Key Research Papers
  13. Connections
  14. Featured Videos

1. A Childhood in Aarau

Max Bircher was born on August 22, 1867, in Aarau, the capital of the Swiss canton of Aargau. His father, Heinrich Bircher, was a notary; his mother, Berta Krüsi, came from Gais in Appenzell. When Max was in his mid-teens his father stood guarantee for a bond that went bad, and the family fell into poverty, a turn recorded by Meyer-Renschhausen and Wirz in the most detailed scholarly study of his life.

He was born with a heart defect, a fact the German-language biographies record. He nevertheless lived to 71 and worked as chief physician of his own clinic until the end of his life.

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2. Medical Studies in Zurich and Berlin

From 1885 to 1891 Bircher studied medicine at the universities of Zurich and Berlin. In Zurich he came under the influence of the psychiatrist August Forel, who was then known for his work on hypnosis and for his campaign against alcohol. Bircher-Benner later banned alcohol in his own clinic and gave the mind a central place in his teaching.

He completed his studies and qualified as a physician in 1891. A note on the dates: the Neue Deutsche Biographie and the German Wikipedia article give 1891 as the year of his doctorate (Promotion), while the Historisches Lexikon der Schweiz dates his doctorate to 1897. The sources agree that he finished his medical training and began to practise in 1891; they differ only on when the doctoral degree itself was conferred.

In his early years as a doctor he also travelled to learn the water cures that were popular in German-speaking Europe: the methods of Sebastian Kneipp, the scientific hydrotherapy of Wilhelm Winternitz in Vienna, and the natural-healing sanatorium of Heinrich Lahmann near Dresden. Water treatments, light, air and exercise stayed part of his clinic’s regime for the rest of his life (see Hydrotherapy).

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3. The Aussersihl Practice and Marriage

On December 1, 1891, Bircher opened his first medical practice in Aussersihl, then a crowded working-class district of Zurich. Eklöf notes that he “began to practise as a doctor in Zurich’s workers’ quarter in 1891”. This is the start date the site uses for his working years, 1891–1939.

He married Elisabeth Benner (1872–1945), from Mulhouse in Alsace, the daughter of a chemist. He joined her surname to his own and was known from then on as Bircher-Benner. The Historisches Lexikon der Schweiz and the German Wikipedia article date the marriage to 1893; Meyer-Renschhausen and Wirz give 1899. This page follows the two sources that agree on 1893.

The couple had seven children. Three sons became physicians: Max Edwin Bircher (1895–1977), Franklin Bircher-Rey (1896–1988) and Willy Bircher (1898–1970). Another son, Ralph Bircher (1899–1990), became an editor and publisher and co-owned the family’s publishing house.

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4. The Raw Apple and the 1895 Patient

Bircher-Benner traced his discovery of raw food to two experiences, which he retold for the rest of his life. The first came in 1894, when he fell ill with jaundice. He recovered, as he told it, after Elisabeth Benner fed him finely sliced raw apple. Meyer-Renschhausen and Wirz write: “Again and again, he told the story of how he had overcome jaundice.” The full story, and the way it grew in the telling, is on its own page: The Raw Apple Cure: How Bircher-Benner Discovered Raw Food.

The second came the following year, 1895. He was treating a woman with a long-standing stomach illness who could not digest the cooked, bland diet that medicine prescribed, and whom other doctors had given up on. A German vegetarian, described in one source as a student and in another as a naturopath, suggested that he try uncooked fruit and vegetables instead. Bircher-Benner gave her a carefully puréed raw diet, and she recovered. The Historisches Lexikon der Schweiz calls this the “decisive experience” that convinced him of the healing power of raw plant food. From then on, raw fruit and vegetables were the centre of his treatment, and he spent the next five years working out a theory to explain why they worked (see Bircher-Benner’s Raw Food (Rohkost) Therapy).

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5. The Private Clinic of 1897

In the autumn of 1897 Bircher-Benner left general practice and opened a small private clinic on the Zürichberg. The Historisches Lexikon der Schweiz describes it as a private clinic for dietetics and physical healing methods; Meyer-Renschhausen and Wirz give its size as seven beds. The Neue Deutsche Biographie counts his years as chief physician from this date: he led his own clinic for 42 years, from 1897 until his death in 1939.

He kept in touch with the other health reformers of his day. In 1897 he ordered one of the American physician John Harvey Kellogg’s medicinal baths for his clinic, and he later sent his eldest son to Battle Creek, Michigan, where Kellogg worked.

Some English-language accounts say that the “Vital Force” sanatorium opened in 1897. The Swiss and German sources make clear there were two institutions: the small clinic of 1897, and the larger Lebendige Kraft sanatorium of 1904 (section 7).

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6. The 1900 Lecture and the Doctors’ Rejection

By 1900 Bircher-Benner had a theory. Drawing on the physics of energy, and especially the second law of thermodynamics, he argued that every transformation of food loses energy: raw plant food, which holds the sun’s energy most directly, is worth more than cooked food, and plant food more than animal food. The Historisches Lexikon der Schweiz summarizes it as a way of ranking foods by their “living” solar energy. That theory has its own page: Sunlight Food: Bircher-Benner’s Theory of Food as Stored Sunlight.

In 1900 he presented the theory to the medical society of Zurich. It was printed the same year as “Erste Mitteilung über eine neue Ernährungslehre” (“First report on a new theory of nutrition”) in the Correspondenz-Blatt für Schweizer Ärzte. His colleagues’ response was hostile. Eklöf reports that they held he had left the domain of science; his son Ralph later called the episode an “excommunication”. Meyer-Renschhausen and Wirz write that the medical establishment treated his ideas as heresy and quackery. (One secondary source says he was expelled from the Zurich medical association; no scholarly source we could find confirms that, so this page does not repeat it.)

Around the same time he created the dish that would make his name famous: a raw apple preparation he called d’Spys (Swiss German for “the dish”), with a spoonful of soaked oats, grated nuts, lemon juice and a little condensed milk. Fruit, not cereal, was the main ingredient. He said he was inspired by a dish an Alpine herdswoman had served him and his wife in a mountain hut. The original recipe is on The Original Bircher Muesli Recipe and History.

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7. The Lebendige Kraft Sanatorium (1904)

In 1904 Bircher-Benner opened a much larger sanatorium on the Zürichberg, near the Dolder, and named it Lebendige Kraft, “vital force”. It began with about 20 beds and had room for about 80 in-patients by 1914.

Life there was strict. Patients rose early for a long walk in the forest before breakfast, ate the raw-food diet (fruit or muesli first, then raw vegetables, then a cooked dish), worked in the garden, exercised, took water and electrical treatments, and went to bed early. Alcohol, coffee, chocolate and tobacco were forbidden. The novelist Thomas Mann, who stayed in the spring of 1909, called it in a letter a hygienisches Zuchthaus, a “hygienic prison”, and the experience fed into his novel Der Zauberberg (The Magic Mountain).

The sanatorium drew patients from across Europe. Eklöf’s study of its records found that Swiss patients made up about 32 percent, Germans about 30 percent and Swedes about 16 percent, the third-largest group; at least 69 Swedes stayed as in-patients between 1904 and 1939, most of them from the upper classes, about half from the Stockholm area, and 55 percent of them women. The history of the building and its later years is on The Lebendige Kraft Sanatorium in Zurich (1904–1994).

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8. Books, a Journal and the 1927 Honour

Bircher-Benner wrote steadily for doctors and for the public. His first book set out the theory he had lectured on: Kurze Grundzüge der Ernährungs-Therapie auf Grund der Energie-Spannung der Nahrung (“Short outline of nutritional therapy based on the energy tension of food”, Berlin, 1903). It was followed by Die Grundlagen unserer Ernährung (“The foundations of our nutrition”, 1921), Eine neue Ernährungslehre (“A new theory of nutrition”, 1924), the two-volume Der Menschenseele Not (“The distress of the human soul”, 1927 and 1933), Ernährungskrankheiten (“Diseases of nutrition”, 1928) and Diätetische Heilbehandlung (“Dietary healing treatment”, 1935). With his son Max Edwin he wrote the cookbook Früchtespeisen und Rohgemüse (“Fruit dishes and raw vegetables”), which had reached its tenth edition by 1929. Several of his books appeared in English in London, including Food Science for All and a New Sunlight Theory of Nutrition (1928).

In 1923 he founded a monthly journal, Der Wendepunkt im Leben und im Leiden (“The turning point in life and in suffering”); his books came out from the associated Wendepunkt publishing house in Zurich. The full list, with the later reprints, is on Max Bircher-Benner: Books, Successors and Legacy.

The year 1927 brought two turns. A younger colleague honoured Bircher-Benner’s work before the same Zurich medical society that had rejected his 1900 lecture, a public recognition after 27 years. And, nearly 60 years old, he publicly declared himself a vegetarian, for ethical reasons, for the first time.

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9. London 1933 and the Laws of Order

By the 1930s Bircher-Benner had an international audience. On January 6, 1933, he addressed the Food Education Society at University College London; the talk was printed that year as The Prevention of Disease by Correct Feeding. In it he called food “accumulated sunshine stored up in the vegetable kingdom” and described this as the quintessence of the theory he had discovered at the beginning of the century. He ranked foods in three classes, with raw plant foods first, and stated that the more severe and obstinate an illness, the more the first class should dominate the diet. He also listed the conditions he reported improving on his diet, among them chronic constipation, and remarked that “a similar basis underlies the Gerson-Herrmannsdorfer-Sauerbruch diet” (see Max Gerson). The front matter of the printed address notes that an institute in Paris, Les Forces Vives, had been founded to carry out his teaching, and that his son Franklin Bircher-Rey lectured at the Sorbonne.

In 1937 he gave his whole method a name: Ordnungstherapie, “order therapy”. Health, he taught, is order and harmony in the body, the mind, the surroundings and the course of the day; illness follows disorder. He set out rules of conduct covering nutrition, the skin (light, air and water), breathing, movement, the rhythm of life and the life of the mind, which Meyer-Renschhausen and Wirz call his “Nine Laws of Order”. Melzer, Melchart and Saller (2004) show that the term and its definition are his, although later writers often credited it to Kneipp. He published the idea in Ordnungsgesetze des Lebens (“Laws of order of life”, 1938), three lectures for the Food Education Society, and the same year wrote his autobiographical Vom Werden des neuen Arztes (“On the making of the new doctor”, Dresden, 1938). See Ordnungstherapie: Bircher-Benner’s Laws of Order for Health.

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10. Death in 1939 and the Family That Carried On

Max Bircher-Benner died in Zurich on January 24, 1939, aged 71, still the chief physician of his sanatorium. That year the clinic took his name and became the Bircher-Benner-Klinik. Elisabeth Bircher-Benner died in 1945.

His sons and his niece carried the clinic on. The German Wikipedia article says the sons Franklin and Willy led it after his death, and the University of Zurich archive records Willy Bircher as chief physician; a 2010 Swiss news feature, by contrast, says none of the sons became clinic director. His niece Dagmar Liechti-von Brasch (1911–1993), the daughter of his sister Alice, was its chief physician for several decades from the 1940s (the sources give her years in charge as 1942–1973 or 1947–1980), and she published on fresh food and nutrition into the 1960s. The clinic closed in 1994 (one source says 1995), and the building was sold in 1998.

His papers and the clinic’s records and photographs from 1891 to 1969 are held by the Archive for the History of Medicine at the University of Zurich, where the patient files remain closed for 120 years. His influence ran on through Werner Kollath’s whole-food (Vollwert) concept, which Kollath built mainly on Bircher-Benner’s publications, and through the Swedish health-home movement; the nutrition historian Claus Leitzmann (2014) names him with Sylvester Graham and John Harvey Kellogg among the prominent vegetarians of history.

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11. Timeline

YearEvent
1867Born August 22 in Aarau, son of the notary Heinrich Bircher and Berta Krüsi.
c. 1882Family falls into poverty after his father guarantees a bad bond.
1885–1891Studies medicine in Zurich and Berlin; influenced by August Forel.
1891Qualifies as a physician (doctorate dated 1891 by NDB, 1897 by HLS); opens his practice in Zurich-Aussersihl, December 1.
1893Marries Elisabeth Benner of Mulhouse and takes the name Bircher-Benner (one source: 1899).
1894Falls ill with jaundice; recovers on raw apple, as he later told it.
1895Cures a chronically stomach-ill woman with a raw diet, his “decisive experience”; son Max Edwin born.
1897Opens a small private clinic (seven beds) on the Zürichberg in the autumn.
1900Lectures to the Zurich medical society on his new theory of nutrition and is rejected; the apple dish d’Spys appears around this time.
1903Kurze Grundzüge der Ernährungs-Therapie (Berlin).
1904Opens the Lebendige Kraft sanatorium on the Zürichberg.
1909Thomas Mann stays in the spring.
1914The sanatorium has about 80 beds.
1921Die Grundlagen unserer Ernährung.
1923Founds the monthly Der Wendepunkt im Leben und im Leiden.
1924Eine neue Ernährungslehre.
1927Honoured before the Zurich medical society; declares himself a vegetarian; Der Menschenseele Not, vol. I.
1928Ernährungskrankheiten; Food Science for All and a New Sunlight Theory of Nutrition (London).
1933Address to the Food Education Society, University College London, January 6.
1935Diätetische Heilbehandlung.
1936Vom Wesen und der Organisation der Nahrungsenergie.
1937Introduces the term Ordnungstherapie.
1938Ordnungsgesetze des Lebens; Vom Werden des neuen Arztes.
1939Dies January 24 in Zurich; the clinic becomes the Bircher-Benner-Klinik.
1940s–1970sHis sons and his niece Dagmar Liechti-von Brasch carry the clinic on.
1994The clinic closes (one source: 1995).

Sources for these dates: the Historisches Lexikon der Schweiz; the Neue Deutsche Biographie; Meyer-Renschhausen and Wirz (1999) and Eklöf (2005), listed below.

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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. Leitzmann C. Vegetarian nutrition: past, present, future. Am J Clin Nutr. 2014;100 Suppl 1:496S-502S. — PubMed PMID: 24898226
  5. Bircher-Benner MO. [Why natural food?]. Veg Bode. 1948;51(9):132-4. — PubMed PMID: 18099596 (posthumous reprint of his text)
  6. Koning MW. [Dr. Bircher-Benner’s diet]. Veg Bode. 1948;51(9):137-40. — PubMed PMID: 18099597
  7. Bircher W. [Are Waerland and Dr. Bircher-Benner]. Volksgesundheit Bad Hombg. 1947;40(7):235-7. — PubMed PMID: 20258547
  8. 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
  9. Kunz-Bircher A, Liechti-von Brasch D. [Clinical significance of fresh food]. Hippokrates. 1956;27(22):705-13. — PubMed PMID: 13384929
  10. 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

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=history+of+vegetarianism
  4. https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/?term=raw+food+diet

Further Reading

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Connections

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