Death Be Not Proud

by John Gunther

  “How’s my blood, Father?” he would ask.

  “Fine.”

  “Let me know if it goes under a thousand.”

  The first series of mustard shots did Johnny great benefit. Of this there is no reasonable doubt, I believe. They stepped up his vitality and made him fresher, stronger. As to the second series I am not so sure. For we decided on an additional course of mustard, and Johnny had these further shots late in August, when the first results seemed good and X-rays were still precluded by the state of the scalp.

  Johnny checked out of this visit to Neurological presently and he was well enough, that same afternoon, to see the movie Henry V with Frances and my sister Jean and to walk a few blocks. But there was something sardonic in his last word to his favorite nurse when she said goodbye. “Oh,” he waved to her, “I’ll be back.”

  I have before me now a slip of paper on which, that evening he scribbled down an agenda list for the country; it gives some measure of his ardent hopes and fears:

  1

  2

  3

  4

  Bandage

  Fluids

  Sailing

  Biclying (sic)

  Swimming

  Traveling

  Rowing

  Driving

  Hair

  Horse

  Athletics

  Pennicillin (sic)

  Bone

  Glasses

  Nap

  Out in the country he picked up quickly. One could see him brace himself valiantly and set about making up lost time. He did schoolwork and for relaxation worked out mathematically all the odds possible in poker, among many other things. Once he listed all his doctors; once, fascinated like most children by the mysterious entity of the family, he drew up his family tree with great elaborateness. One morning in New York I got this letter:

  Saturday

  DEAR PAP,

  Here is the list of chemicals:

  1 lb. acetone

  4 oz. Ammonium Chloride

  1 oz. Sodium hydride

  U-tube (with arms)

  2 ft. thick-walled rubber tubing to fit arms U-tube

  2 rubber stoppers to fit U-tube

  2 ft. glass tubing to fit inside rubber tubing.

  1-hole rubber stopper into which glass tubing will fit.

  Any test-tube into which stopper will fit.

  love,

  JOHNNY

  I scurried around to pick up all this and in addition to find a cargo of dry ice he needed. What shame I feel now that I had never taken this request for dry ice seriously enough! He had asked me for it several times, but there seemed to be more important things to worry about, and I had neglected to bring it. Johnny repeated his request—gentle soul!—but never loudly enough to embarrass me. Finally I brought it. This dry ice (enough to fill a bucket) was of the utmost importance. With it he was going to perform an experiment he had been working on, in theory, all summer—the liquefaction of ammonia by a quite new process.

  One of Johnny’s great friends, and a cardinal influence in his life, was his neighbor Mr. Weaver, who taught chemistry at Andover. For summer after summer, this good and generous man had been Johnny’s best adult friend. Mr. Weaver came over and helped him when his own weakened hands and failing co-ordination were not quite up to the mechanical tasks involved. Johnny insulated a big can with rock wool and pumped the gas as he made it through another receptacle filled with the dry ice. The experiment worked, praise be. Never before had ammonia been liquefied in this precise way. Johnny had truly invented something. His pride and happiness knew no bounds—though he scoffed modestly at what he had done.

  Frances wrote: “A leaf in the solution freezes stiff, then breaks at the blow of a knife with an icy clink. Ï triumph! His dark blue eyes shone with joy.” That evening when he kissed her good night he exclaimed, “It’s been another fine day, Mother!”

  There were preciously grasped delights that summer. Once Frances found him late at night intently rearranging his rocks in accurate geological classification. Once she had a party, with the ladies in long dresses and their hair up, and Johnny helped serve the food like a serious, conscientious host. He read Christopher Morley’s “O n Unanswering Letters” with delight, and one evening I read aloud a Ring Lardner story about a caddie and he laughed till the tears came. Once I gave him a ten-dollar bill and he asked Frances, “Where shall I hide it?” She replied, “In the only place possible—in bed.” Johnny: “What a woman!”

  Once we celebrated a release from hospital by giving him a spoonful of champagne. He had another spoonful and then announced, “Let’s have a little more formality around here. I’m going to call you Mother and Father from now on, instead of Mutti and Papa.”

  Once Mr. Boyden and Mr. Hayden, one of his favorite teachers, drove down from Deerfield to have a day with him. This was a red-letter occasion indeed, and Johnny talked to them soberly about school the next term. Of course it had occurred to him by this time that he might be unable to get back to school, but the idea was so unthinkable that for the most part he suppressed it. Mr. Boyden’s visit was a great turning point in restoring hope. Johnny explained to him how he intended to make up the time he had lost, and then registered frankly all the complaints he had previously made to us. Later he amplified his views. “It’s not that I’m complaining; I was just giving an explanation of why I don’t get better marks.” Still later: “You know, Mr. Boyden is the most persuasive man anybody ever met!”

  He was busy, impatient and irritated but not discouraged at not being fully well, and packed with wit. Once he said that for me to lie on the daybed was like being a cigar on a toothpick. I was hungry once and he said, “Give Father three beefsteaks for an afternoon snack—it will help his vitality.” One evening the laundry failed us, and he had to wear a pair of my pajamas. “So, “ he sighed with mock weariness, “the dread day has finally come when I am you.” We continually urged him to rest, and it was a struggle for Frances to get him to bed at a reasonable hour. “I f I hear any more of that talk about not staying up till twelve, I’ll disinherit myself,” he would say. One day he said he had discovered a real reason for the existence of relatives and in-laws—“For surgeons to practice on.” He often joked about his illness. “ I bet that ole’ mustard has knocked the tumor out!”

  But on August 31 there was again a new leak in the bump, and the white blood count was below 1,000. The papilledema was high again, and he seemed to be fading fast.

  Meantime we were working on another tack. Not for a moment had we stopped searching. Early in the summer Raymond Swing told me astonishing stories about a doctor named Max Gerson who had achieved remarkable arrestations of cancer and other illnesses by a therapy based on diet. Gerson was, and is, a perfectly authentic M.D., but unorthodox. He had been attacked by the Journal of the American Medical Association and others of the massive vested interests in medicine; Swing himself had been under bitter criticism for a broadcast describing and praising highly Gerson’s philosophy and methods of dietary cure. My own first reaction was skeptical, and Frances was dubious too. Then I learned that Gerson had long experience actually in brain tumor cases, having been associated for years with a famous German neurosurgeon, Foerster, in a tumor clinic at Breslau before the war. I went to see Gerson. He showed me his records of tumors—even gliomas—apparentiy cured. But I was still doubtful because it seemed to me inconceivable that anything so serious as a glioma could be cleared up by anything so simple as a diet. He impressed me greatly as a human being, however. This was a man full of idiosyncrasy but also one who knew much, who had suffered much, and who had a sublime faith in his own ideas. Frances and I had a long talk with Traeger. At first he violently opposed the Gerson claims, but then he swung over on the ground that, after all, Johnny was deteriorating very fast and in any case the diet could do no harm. I stayed at Madison one weekend and Frances went into New York, visited Gerson herself, and looked over his nursing home. She was impressed too. We made
a sudden decision over the telephone. We had tried orthodoxy, both static and advanced, and so now we would give heterodoxy a chance. If only we could stave Death off a little longer! And—once more—there was absolutely nothing to lose.

  I took Johnny out to dinner in Madison and broke it to him that we would be going into town the next day for new and further treatment. This was a grievous shock. It was the first time that I saw him seriously upset. He struggled to keep from tears. He flung himself away from me and crept upstairs. Mostly this was because he was midway through preparations for another serious experiment. But by the next morning he was buoyant again—so much so that I dreaded more than I could tell what would have to be the next bad news broken to him, that he could not go back to school. “I’m sorry I bawled last night, Father,” he said with his wonderful radiant smile. Then, limping slightly, he pushed off to his laboratory for a morning’s work, sober and dutiful. School—and the science work he was doing—was practically all he talked about.

  Frances came out, and on September 7 we drove swiftly in to Dr. Gerson’s nursing home. It was a fiercely hot, noisy afternoon, and Johnny was sick with strain, just plain sick. So a new long chapter in his indomitable struggle began.

  3

  Those September days were grim at first. Johnny lay there pale and panting with misery. His blood count slipped lower and lower, and great bruises appeared on his arms and chest, caused by breakdown of the capillaries. We had been warned that the blood would go very low, and perhaps we were needlessly alarmed—it might well have come back of itself. But anyway we were worried sick. One doctor told us that the reason he had seemed so casual when Johnny entered the Gerson nursing home was his conviction that he couldn’t possibly outlast the week anyway. In particular what is known as the polymorphonuclear count of Johnny’s blood (I will not go into the technical details) was staggeringly low— down to 3 per cent, and the red cells showed a profound anemia. One specialist told us later that he has never known of a recovery with such a blood condition.

  Within a week, Johnny was feeling, not worse, but much better! The blood count rose steadily, the bruises were absorbed with extraordinary speed, the wound in the bulge healed, and, miracle of miracles, the bump on the skull was going down!

  Traeger had walked down the street with me to meet Gerson. He was deeply pessimistic. He said, “We’ll move Johnny to a hospital and try massive transfusions—nothing else can save him.” The two doctors retired into the kitchen, and came out after half an hour. Then Traeger looked Johnny over slowly and said, “Never mind about the transfusions. Let’s do it Gerson’s way for another twenty-four hours.”

  First, Gerson took Johnny off penicillin. This we thought to be a very grave risk, but, he insisted, penicillin could irritate a tumor. Second, he refused to permit any transfusions or other emergency measures whatsoever. What a terrible chance we thought he was taking! Third, he demanded that for some weeks at least Johnny should have rest, absolute rest, nothing but rest, rest, rest.

  The Gerson diet is saltless and fatless, and for a long time proteins are excluded or held to an extreme minimum. The theory behind this is simple enough. Give nature opportunity, and nature herself will heal. It is the silliest thing in the world to attempt to arrest cancer of the tongue, say, by cutting off the tongue. What the physician should strive for, if he gets a case in time, is to change the metabolism of the body so that the cancer (or another affliction) dies of itself. The whole theory is erected on the basis that the chemistry of the body can be so altered as to eliminate disease. Perhaps this may sound far-fetched. But that diet, any special diet, can markedly influence bodily behavior is, of course, well known. Consider inversely how a milligram or so of a poisonous substance, like potassium cyanide, can almost instantly kill a body. Ho w Gerson decided what foods helped to create new healthy cells, as the diseased cells sloughed off, is not altogether clear to me. At any rate the first principle is to make the diet potassium-rich and sodium-free. Gerson took the line that the body spends an absurdly disproportionate share of its energy getting rid of waste, and that therefore, when the body is ill, it will be much freer to combat illness and build healthy cells if the amount of waste is drastically cut down. Hence, as a patient enters upon the Gerson diet, not only does he subsist largely on specially prepared fruit juices and fresh vegetables that burn down to the minimum of ash, but he has enema after enema—in the beginning as many as four or five a day, till the system is totally washed out and cleansed.

  Gerson’s sanitarium, operated by his daughter and Mr. and Mrs. Seeley, was run with the utmost loving care; I cannot possibly pay tribute enough to Mrs. Seeley and to Miss Gerson for what they did for Johnny. Also I saw, month after month,’ a number of Gerson’s cases. One patient, it happened, was an acquaintance of mine of twenty years’ standing whom I altogether trusted. I did not know whether or not Gerson could cure, or even check, a malignant glioblastoma. I did learn beyond reasonable doubt that his diet did effect other cures. Gerson himself, zealot that he is, has never claimed that his diet will “cure anything,” as his enemies sometimes charge. But some of his results have been astonishing.

  One of our doctors (hostile to Gerson at first) said one evening that September, “I f this thing works, we can chuck millions of dollars’ worth of equipment in the river, and get rid of cancer by cooking carrots in a pot.”

  The regime was certainly onerous. Johnny said wearily after the first week, “ I even tell time by enemas.”

  This is what Johnny had to eat during the next months. For breakfast, a pint of fruit juice, oatmeal, an apple-carrot mash, and a special soup made of fresh vegetables—parsley root, celery knob, leek, tomatoes. This soup he continued to take at intervals during the day, until he had a quart or a quart and a half. For lunch, heaping portions of cooked vegetables, a salad, fresh fruit, the soup and mash, and a baked potato. For dinner, the same. Later he was permitted pot cheese, skimmed milk, and dry pumpernickel. Nothing canned. Nothing seasoned, smoked, or frozen. Above all nothing salted. No meat, eggs, or fish. No cream, butter, or other fats. No sugar except honey and maple sugar. No candy, sausages, ice cream, pickles, spices, preserved foods, white flour, condiments, cakes, or any of the multitude of small things a child loves. Very little water. All the vegetables had to be cooked with no added water or steam, after being washed, not scraped, and without using pressure cookers or anything with aluminum, and the fruits had to be squeezed in a nonmetallic squeezer. Back to nature!

  Do not think this was starvation. Some patients gain rather than lose on the Gerson diet. The meals are enormous in size and, as Mrs. Seeley prepared them, exquisitely com-posed. Then to compensate for the lack of minerals there are injections of crude liver extract every day, and multitudinous pills. These were assembled in a glass dish every morning, in various colors to denote what minerals and vitamins they contained—thirty or more in all. Johnny took niacin, liver powder, lubile (dried powdered bile), vitamins A and D, iron, dicalcium phosphate with viosterol, and lugol. Iodine—in a precisely calculated amount—is essential to the cure.

  Johnny’s attitude to all this—he was a youngster with a vigorous, healthy appetite—can readily be imagined. He loathed the diet, but he held onto it with the utmost scrupulous fidelity. Carefully he checked off in his notebook the pills he took each day. Once the reason for a thing was explained to him, he faithfully accepted it. The jokes and protests he made were to let off steam, or provide wry humor to the occasion. One evening I asked him if he wanted some-thing, and he replied instantly, “A dose of bichloride of mercury.” Once he said that the husks of vegetable in the Gerson soup were deliberately left there as “abrasives to scour out the stomach” and he announced that he had discovered a cure for tapeworm. “Put the patient on the Gerson diet and the tapeworm will evacuate itself in despair.”

  All that Johnny was really losing was the taste of food. But the monotony depressed him and he sighed on one occasion. “Really, Mother, this is too much to bear!” On
ce as I was leaving for the evening he called out, “Have a big steak for me and come back and tell me all about it!” Later he was worried that when the diet finally ended there might still be a meat shortage. One night his voice was sick with worry. “Wouldn’t just a little meat strengthen me and help the bruised nerves in my head heal?”

  But he was getting better. This, overwhelmingly, was all that counted. The papilledema dropped sharply, and by the end of September the pupils were almost normal—this was an almost unbelievable demonstration of recovery. Moreover the blood count was up to normal, and, incontestably, the bump was smaller. I left Mrs. Seeley’s one evening and walked to the corner and had a cup of coffee, almost insane with sudden hope. I was beside myself with a violent and incredulous joy. Johnny was going to recover after all! I thought of all the surgeons and the specialists and how dumfounded they would be; I thought of all our friends and their sympathy and how the burden of grief would be lifted to a whole small community. Johnny was going to pull through, after all, despite everything, and get well! He was going to beat this evil, lawless thing! He’d show the surgeons how a boy with a real will to live could live!

  For these extravagant hopes I had, I must say, a certain medical backing for a time. One of our doctors was very optimistic and all were co-operating well. We had feared that, once we delivered Johnny over to Gerson, the more straight-laced physicians might refuse to see him in this so-called black sheep’s den. One doctor, out of the whole lot, was in fact angry and did wash his hands of us—temporarily; he said we had spoiled the “controls,” as if Johnny were a rabbit. But Traeger came over to have a consultation with Gerson every Saturday for months; Putnam, a great man, had no hesitation in visiting him and later Gerson several times visited Neurological (which we had been told would be utterly impossible), and Lester Mount, who as time wore on became the closest of all the doctors to Johnny except Traeger, and who loved Johnny as Johnny loved him, came to see him regularly, though a surgeon of Mount’s standing rarely makes calls at all.