The Gerson Therapy: History and Origins

Table of Contents

1. A Therapy With a Founder
2. Max Gerson: Early Life and Medical Training
3. The Migraine Diet: The Founding Observation
4. Skin Tuberculosis and the Sauerbruch Trial
5. Sodium, Potassium, and Healing the Whole Body
6. Flight from Nazi Germany and a New Start in America
7. Cancer, Coffee Enemas, and the 1946 Senate Hearing
8. Albert Schweitzer and the 1958 Book
9. After Gerson: Charlotte Gerson and the Work Carried On
10. Key Research Papers
11. Connections
12. Featured Videos

A Therapy With a Founder

Many of the protocols collected under "remedies" have no single inventor — they are old folk practices, or ideas many people arrived at independently. The Gerson Therapy is different. It is named after a real, identifiable physician, Max Gerson, and almost every distinctive feature of the program can be traced to a specific clinical observation he made at a specific point in his career. To understand why the therapy looks the way it does — thirteen freshly pressed juices a day, no added salt, coffee enemas, potassium, iodine and thyroid — you follow Gerson’s own life from a migraine sufferer’s self-experiment in Germany to a Park Avenue practice in New York.

The therapy was assembled step by step over about four decades: a diet Gerson designed for his own headaches, then its use for his migraine patients, then skin tuberculosis, lung, kidney and bone tuberculosis, the chronic illnesses those patients also carried, and finally cancer. He summarized it in his 1958 book A Cancer Therapy: Results of Fifty Cases, published the year before he died. Charlotte Gerson and Morton Walker’s The Gerson Therapy describes him as a physician who "was no longer treating a disease; he was helping the body to heal itself of nearly all dysfunctions." This page follows that thread in order.

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Max Gerson: Early Life and Medical Training

According to the book, Max Gerson was born in Wongrowitz, Germany (today Wągrowiec in Poland), on October 18, 1881, the third child and second boy in a German-Jewish family of nine healthy children. He showed an inquiring mind early: at six and a half he changed the fertilizers in his mother’s flowerbeds to see what would happen — experiments that generally killed her flowers, and that she quickly stopped. At his Gymnasium (high school) graduation, the book relates, he solved an unfamiliar mathematics problem with a method his teacher could not judge; the paper was sent to a mathematics professor at the University of Berlin, who replied that it was an entirely new and original solution and that the young man should study mathematics. A family council concluded that, with no Jewish mathematics professor anywhere in Germany, he would never be more than a high-school teacher, and everyone, Max included, agreed he should study medicine instead.

Gerson studied medicine at the universities of Breslau, Würzburg, Berlin, and Freiburg. The book records that he completed his internship in Höchst am Main in 1907, worked as an assistant to Professor Albert Fränkel in Berlin, and from 1909 until the First World War worked at Berlin’s Friedrichshain Hospital, with a short period at a children’s clinic. As a captain in the German Army Medical Corps he was, for almost half a decade, a close associate of the neurosurgeon Ottfried Foerster. In 1919 he established his own practice in Bielefeld.

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The Migraine Diet: The Founding Observation

The book places the true beginning of the Gerson Therapy in Gerson’s own suffering. From his university years he had exceedingly severe migraines, and by his residency they were so disabling that he sometimes spent three days a week in a darkened room with nausea, vomiting, sensitivity to light, and one-sided head pain. His professors, the book says, advised him "to learn to live with it." He searched books, papers and authorities without result until he found a case report in an Italian medical journal of a woman whose migraines were relieved by changing her diet. Gerson reasoned that his attacks might be caused by foods he could not digest.

He first lived on nothing but milk for ten days, with no change. Reasoning that animals never drink milk once weaned and that human anatomy resembles that of plant-eating animals, he tried an all-apple diet — raw and baked apples, applesauce, apple juice, compote — and became well, with no migraines. He then added foods one at a time; a wrong food could bring on a migraine within twenty minutes. When cooked foods caused trouble, he concluded the culprit was not the cooking but the added salt. Once salt was removed he could eat cooked vegetables, potatoes and grains freely. He named the result his "migraine diet": fresh fruits and vegetables, mostly raw but some cooked, and totally free of salt. When his migraine patients tried it, the book reports, they returned free of headaches as long as they did not "cheat," and relapsed when they went back to salt.

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Skin Tuberculosis and the Sauerbruch Trial

The next discovery came, the book relates, from one of those migraine patients. After a short time on the diet he reported that his skin tuberculosis — lupus vulgaris, then considered incurable — had disappeared along with his headaches. Gerson at first told him it must have been something else, but the patient had bacteriological studies proving the diagnosis. In the book’s words, "for the first time in the history of medicine, Dr. Gerson saw skin tuberculosis healing from treatment." The patient sent friends from the hospital where he had been confined, and after some weeks they too recovered on the diet.

News of these results reached Professor Ferdinand Sauerbruch of Munich, described in the book as a world-famous lung tuberculosis specialist. After long discussions with Gerson, Sauerbruch set up a clinical trial of the method — the diet known in European medicine as the Sauerbruch–Herrmannsdorfer–Gerson diet. Over an extended period he treated 450 "incurable" skin tuberculosis patients, and the book reports that 446 recovered fully. Sauerbruch described the trial and its results in his autobiography, Master Surgeon. Gerson then extended the diet to lung, kidney and bone tuberculosis and reported that these cases responded too. His book on the dietary treatment of tuberculosis, completed in Vienna, was published by Franz Deuticke in 1934.

While treating these migraine and tuberculosis patients, Gerson found that many also had high blood pressure, asthma, allergies, kidney damage, arthritis, residual stroke or hardening of the arteries, and the book reports that these conditions disappeared as well. This, it says, was the point at which Gerson recognized he was treating the patient’s underlying problem rather than suppressing symptoms.

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Sodium, Potassium, and Healing the Whole Body

In the course of his tuberculosis work, the book explains, Gerson concluded that one of the basic problems of disease was the loss of potassium from tissue cells and the penetration of sodium into them — later named tissue damage syndrome. The cell, trying to protect itself, binds the sodium with water, which shows up as edema. The book cites Malcolm Dixon and Edwin C. Webb’s textbook Enzymes (Academic Press, 1964) as confirming his view: potassium generally acts as an activator of enzymes, sodium generally as an inhibitor. Food processing and ordinary cooking deplete potassium and add salt, and the book describes how, after years of excess, the body’s ability to excrete sodium is reduced, damaging enzyme systems, the immune system and eventually the liver.

Gerson’s response was to remove all added salt and to give a freshly pressed glass of organic vegetable juice hourly, thirteen times a day. Examining his patients’ urine, he found they often excreted 6 to 8 grams of sodium a day during the first week, even on a sodium-free diet. Swollen ankles and legs returned to normal, abdominal fluid (ascites) decreased, and patients passed large amounts of urine. Gerson also taught that more illness comes from outside stressors: soils fed only nitrogen, phosphorus and potassium, the book says, lack the many other minerals plants and people need, and deficient crops then require fungicides, herbicides and pesticides. Disease, in his view, rests on two problems, deficiency and toxicity, and the therapy was built to correct both.

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Flight from Nazi Germany and a New Start in America

The book relates that in 1933, barely escaping capture and imprisonment because he was Jewish, Gerson moved his family to Vienna, where he completed his tuberculosis book. Charlotte Gerson’s own account adds that the family then moved to France, which Gerson considered safer and where he practiced briefly under another physician’s licensure, and then to England. The Chapter Two biography dates the family’s emigration to New York City to 1938 (another chapter of the book gives 1936 as the year he came to the United States). He passed the New York State medical board examinations and opened a practice on Park Avenue.

There, the book says, he continued to develop the therapy for all types of serious illness, especially cancer. Even before leaving Germany he had treated cancer: in 1928, in Bielefeld, he took on three patients considered hopelessly ill, one dying of inoperable stomach cancer, and the book reports that all three recovered and told other cancer patients about the treatment. Because he recognized that some degenerative disease patients would recover and some would not, he was careful over the next ten years about whom he accepted. In New York he treated hundreds of patients who had been sent home after surgery and radiation, and the book states that the Gerson Therapy brought such patients up to a 50 percent rate of recovery, even in far-advanced cases; it adds that his success rate was lower in patients who had already received chemotherapy once it entered oncology.

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Cancer, Coffee Enemas, and the 1946 Senate Hearing

As his cancer work grew, Gerson found that the body’s tissues released wastes accumulated over many years, and that the liver, which filters these poisons from the blood, could be overloaded and even poisoned by them. To open the bile ducts and help the liver release its toxic load, he introduced his coffee enemas, given to terminally ill patients as often as every four hours in the early stages. The book reports that patients quickly gained pain relief, so that Gerson could discontinue painkilling drugs almost at once, and that high blood pressure usually came down in about five days. It cites the Austrian surgeon Peter Lechner of Graz, who applied the therapy to many outpatients, for the observation that coffee enemas have a visible effect on the colon, and for Wattenberg’s 1981 finding that palmitic acid in coffee strongly raises glutathione S-transferase activity. Gerson supported his patients with potassium, digestive enzymes, thyroid and iodine, liver powder capsules and liver injections, and vitamin B₁₂. Gerson described his cancer results in the medical literature from 1945 onward, including a report in Experimental Medicine and Surgery in 1949 and two papers in the German journal Medizinische Klinik in 1954.

On July 1–3, 1946, a subcommittee of the Senate Committee on Foreign Relations took testimony on Senate Bill 1875, the Pepper–Neely anticancer proposal sponsored by Senator Claude Pepper and Senator Matthew Neely, which the book says would have appropriated $100 million for cancer research. The book records that Gerson became the first physician to demonstrate recovered cancer patients before a United States Senate committee, bringing five patients and the records of five more. ABC newscaster Raymond Gram Swing reported the hearing in his July 3, 1946 broadcast, calling the Gerson dietary approach "a most promising field of research" and noting that "the Sauerbruch-Gerson diet for skin tuberculosis is well-known to European medicine." The book reports that the bill was defeated by four votes, and that had it passed it would have supported extensive research into the Gerson Therapy.

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Albert Schweitzer and the 1958 Book

Gerson’s most famous patient was Albert Schweitzer, the medical missionary, philosopher and 1952 Nobel Peace Prize laureate. The book reports that Gerson cured Schweitzer of adult-onset diabetes at age seventy-five after six weeks on the therapy, after which Schweitzer returned to Lambaréné, worked past ninety, and lived to ninety-three. Earlier, Gerson had treated Schweitzer’s wife, Helene, who had contracted lung tuberculosis in the tropics and was, the book says, in terminal condition; she recovered completely and lived another twenty-eight years. He also treated a serious skin disease in their daughter, Rhena, who was a teenage friend of Charlotte Gerson. In his eulogy Schweitzer wrote: "I see in Dr. Max Gerson one of the most eminent geniuses in the history of medicine. Many of his basic ideas have been adopted without having his name connected with them. He has achieved more than seemed possible under adverse conditions. He leaves a legacy which commands attention and which will assure him his due place. Those whom he cured will now attest to the truth of his ideas."

In 1958, the year before his death, Gerson published the summary of his career, A Cancer Therapy: Results of Fifty Cases, which lays out the diet, the juices, the enemas, the medications and the daily schedule. The book states that almost all of the fifty patients had been biopsied by accredited medical institutions before starting, that all but two were in terminal condition, that they survived a minimum of five years, and that at least a dozen remained alive forty-five years after beginning treatment. It has since been reprinted thirty-eight times, with more than 250,000 copies in English and some 88,000 more in four other languages.

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After Gerson: Charlotte Gerson and the Work Carried On

Max Gerson died in New York in the spring of 1959. His youngest daughter, Charlotte Gerson (1922–2019), whom he called "Lotte," had assisted him almost continuously, carrying out his telephoned instructions for the clinic’s patients when he was away; in the first edition of A Cancer Therapy he thanked her for help "wherever she could with great interest and understanding encouragement." After his death she began lecturing on the therapy — first to distribute three thousand remaining copies of his book, then locally and nationally, and eventually to several hundred health organizations around the world.

In 1977, with an associate, she supervised the establishment of the first Gerson Therapy hospital in Tijuana, Mexico, where patients begin the program under staff supervision before continuing it at home. Through the Gerson Institute she trained physicians, nurses, kitchen staff and patients; the book reports that some one hundred holistic physicians in the United States, and many more abroad, were trained to practice the therapy. The book stresses that the full program is demanding and is best carried out under a physician’s supervision, and that healing on the full program typically takes at least two years. The current protocol is described in Charlotte Gerson and Beata Bishop’s 2007 book Healing the Gerson Way, and the history above is told in full in Charlotte Gerson and Morton Walker’s The Gerson Therapy.

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Key Research Papers

The list below gathers Max Gerson’s own publications, reports of his therapy’s results, and the books from which this history is drawn, plus PubMed topic searches. Author names, titles, and journals are given as plain text; only the stable PMID is hyperlinked, and each opens in a new tab.

1. Gerson MB. Dietary considerations in malignant neoplastic diseases; a preliminary report. Review of Gastroenterology. 1945;12:419-424. — PubMed PMID: 21005988
2. Gerson M. Effects of a combined dietary regime on patients with malignant tumors. Experimental Medicine and Surgery. 1949;7(4):299-317. — PubMed PMID: 15396126
3. Gerson M. [No cancer in normal metabolism; results of special therapy]. Medizinische Klinik. 1954;49(5):175-179. — PubMed PMID: 13144228
4. Gerson M. [Cancer a problem of metabolism]. Medizinische Klinik. 1954;49(26):1028-1032. — PubMed PMID: 13202917
5. Gerson M. The cure of advanced cancer by diet therapy: a summary of 30 years of clinical experimentation. Physiological Chemistry and Physics. 1978;10(5):449-464. — PubMed PMID: 751079
6. Cope FW. A medical application of the Ling association-induction hypothesis: the high potassium, low sodium diet of the Gerson cancer therapy. Physiological Chemistry and Physics. 1978;10(5):465-468. — PubMed PMID: 751080
7. Hildenbrand GL, Hildenbrand LC, Bradford K, Cavin SW. Five-year survival rates of melanoma patients treated by diet therapy after the manner of Gerson: a retrospective review. Alternative Therapies in Health and Medicine. 1995;1(4):29-37. — PubMed PMID: 9359807
8. Gerson M. A Cancer Therapy: Results of Fifty Cases and the Cure of Advanced Cancer by Diet Therapy. Whittier Books, New York, 1958 (reprinted by the Gerson Institute). — Historical primary source.
9. Gerson M. Diet Therapy for Lung Tuberculosis. Leipzig: Franz Deuticke, 1934 (as cited in The Gerson Therapy). — Historical primary source.
10. Gerson C, Walker M. The Gerson Therapy: The Proven Nutritional Program for Cancer and Other Illnesses. Chapter Two, "A Brief Biography of Dr. Max Gerson," and Preface. — Book source for this page.

PubMed Topic Searches

1. PubMed: "Gerson therapy"
2. PubMed: Gerson M[Author] diet
3. PubMed: dietary treatment of lupus vulgaris

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Connections

• All Remedies
• The Gerson Therapy
• Gerson Therapy Benefits
• Detox Protocols
• Liver Cleansing
• Anti-Inflammatory Diet
• Celery Juice
• Coffee
• Cancer
• Tuberculosis

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