As printed in the Bracebridge Examiner 1979 (Post humously by her request.)
Part 5
Dr Banting believed Essiac had positive results.
I was Head Nurse at the Sisters of Providence Hospital
in a northern Ontario town when I saw an elderly lady being bathed by one
of my nurses and noticed that one breast was just a mass of scar tissue,
so I asked about it. This lady told me that years before, she had come
out from England to the wilds of northern Ontario to join her husband who
was prospecting out there. She developed cancer and she said an Indian
told her to make a tea out of certain herbs and Drink it.
She did this for over a year and the breast healed,
and although she was nearly eighty years of age, had never had a recurrence.
I was very interested and wrote down the names of
the herbs she had used. Knowing that at that time, doctors threw up their
hands when cancer was discovered in a patient, my thought was that if I
should ever develop cancer, I would use it. A year later, I was visiting
an aged retired doctor whom I knew well and we were walking in his garden,
when he took his cane and lifted a weed and said to me:
"Nurse Caisse, if the people would use or take this,
there would be little or no cancer in the world."
I later discovered that this was one of the herbs
Mrs M. had told me about.
Some time later, I got word that my mother's only
sister had been operated on in Brockville and the doctors had found that
she had cancer of the stomach with a liver involvement. They gave her at
the most - six months to live.
I hastened to her and her doctor, Dr R O Fisher of
Toronto, whom I knew well (having nursed patients for him many times) was
there, so I told him about the herb tea and asked his permission to try
it under his observation. He gave me his consent and was so impressed with
the results that he gave me other hopeless cases to treat for him. (Incidentally,
my Aunt lived for twenty-one years after my treatment.)
Other doctors, hearing about me from Dr Fisher, asked
me to treat patients for them, after everything medical science had to
offer, had been used and failed. They too, were impressed with the results,
so much so, that they got together and had me treat an old man whose face
was eaten away and he was bleeding so badly that they said he could not
last more than ten days. My treatment stopped the bleeding and the face
healed and he lived for six months.
On the strength of what those doctors saw with their
own eyes, eight of them signed a petition to the Department of National
Health and Welfare in Ottawa, asking that I be given facilities to do independent
research of my discovery.
Their petition, dated at Toronto on October 27th,
1926, reads as follows:
To whom it may concern:
Te, the undersigned, believe that the "treatment
for cancer" given by nurse R M Caisse can do no harm and that it relieves
pain, will reduce the enlargement, and will prolong life in hopeless cases.
To the best of our knowledge, she has not been
given a case to treat until everything in medical and surgical science
has been tried without effect and even then she was able to show remarkably
beneficial results on those cases at that late stage.
We would be interested to see her given an opportunity
to prove her work in a large way.
To the best of our knowledge she has treated all
cases free of any charge and has been carrying on this work over the period
of the past two years.
Signed: R N Fisher (L.R.C.P., M.R.C.B.), R
A Blye (M.D.), E T Hoidge (M.B. L.R.C.P. M.R.C.B.), Chas. H Hair (M.D.C.M.),
S Moore (M.D.C.M.), H T Williams (M.D.), J C Robert (M.B.), J A McInnis
(M.D.).
In the meantime, Dr Fisher had shown me how, by elimination
of the protein content, it could be given by injection. It took about two
years to find out just what ingredients could be given hypodermically without
a reaction, and by elimination, we found the ingredients that directly
reduced the growth of the cancer. However, I found that the other ingredients
which could not be injected, were necessary to the treatment, in order
to carry off the destroyed tissue and infections thrown off by the malignancy,
so by giving the injection to destroy the mass of malignant cells and giving
the medicine orally, to purify the blood, I was able to get the best results.
The Department of Health and Welfare, after receiving
the Petition signed by the doctors, sent two doctors from Ottawa to have
me arrested, but when they found that I was working with nine of the most
eminent doctors in Toronto and heard their opinions they did not arrest
me - in fact, one of them (Dr W C Arnold), became so interested that he
arranged to have me work on mice at the Christie Street Hospital Laboratories
with Dr Norich and Dr Locheed. These mice were inoculated with Rous Sarcoma.
I kept these ice alive for fifty-two days, which was longer than anyone
else had been able to do.
Later I did a series of mice with two other doctors
and kept these mice alive for 72 days. Then I made an appointment with
Dr Frederick Banting (of insulin fame). After reading my case notes, he
examined the pictures of the man with the face cancer and said,
"Miss Caisse, I will not say you have a cure for
cancer, but you have more evidence of a beneficial treatment for cancer
than anyone in the world."
He advised me to make application to the University
of Toronto for facilities to do deeper research; he even offered to share
his laboratory in the Banting Institute with me and work with me. However,
in making application to the University, I had to give them my formula.
Thereby they would have my formula and could refuse my application. That
is when I decided to prove it on its own merit, without assistance if necessary
and it was necessary. Dr F G Banting approved my decision.
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