by Wade Frazier

Beginning with the Civil War, the USA rapidly caught up and surpassed Great Britain in industrialization. By 1928, the USA’s industrialization per capita was 50% higher than Great Britain’s, and its gross industrial output was higher than Britain, France, Germany, the Soviet Union, Italy, and Japan combined. Industry dominated the USA, and what is known as the medical-industrial complex was well on the way to its current hegemony.

If that milieu is considered, it is not surprising that a class of men largely took over American industry, beginning during the Civil War. They all bought their way out of military service, and not because they were pacifists. They then began building industrial empires, and war profiteering during the Civil War was how they got their start. Of the big name robber barons, it is generally acknowledged that the most ingenious, ruthless and successful of them all was John D. Rockefeller. The first American oil well was drilled in 1859 in Pennsylvania. After carefully sizing up the new industry, Rockefeller joined it in 1863. He quickly realized that if he could control the industry’s refining arm, he could control it all. All oil production would have to pass through his hands if he controlled refining. His strategy was diabolically ingenious. He used the business of his competitors to get kickbacks from the railroads. He then marched through the new industry, giving his competitors two options: sell out or be wiped out. Those who resisted his offer were quickly run out of business. There were mysterious refinery explosions and deaths in those days for those who refused to sell out. By 1880, Rockefeller controlled 95% of American refining. When he wiped out or bought out a competitor, if his prey put up a vigorous and talented fight, he would try to hire them. He soon amassed a team of the most capable and ruthless businessmen around. Once he controlled the oil industry, he began diversifying. Through direct investment and “philanthropy,” Rockefeller would eventually cast a long shadow over mining, banking, government, the media, education, and – what concerns this essay – medicine. Rockefeller’s father was a genuine snake oil salesman and con man who sold cancer “cures.” John D. learned the business at his father’s knee, when he was around. His father funded his early ventures.

While Rockefeller and the other robber barons built their empires, the American Medical Association (AMA) was also building its monopoly. The AMA’s charter stated that one of its goals was “eliminating the competition.” In the 1850s, the AMA launched its first political campaign, which sought to ban abortion. Before the AMA’s campaign, abortions were legal if they were performed before the baby could be felt kicking, and even the Catholic Church did not oppose it. The AMA’s campaign was stepped up in 1864, decrying abortion’s evils, eventually calling abortionists murderers and executioners. It worked, as between 1875 and 1900, every state but Kentucky passed laws banning all abortions. Hundreds of thousands of American women died during the years that abortion was illegal, as they had back-alley abortions and died from the complications. Not only was the AMA campaigning to ban abortion, it also actively discouraged contraception and even information on fertility. While the AMA clothed itself in righteousness, an examination of the internal record revealed that the AMA’s motivation had nothing whatsoever to do with the sanctity of life. Their war was waged to wipe out female healers. Midwives were the traditional administers of abortion and contraception.

Also in the 1850s, the AMA began campaigning against homeopaths. As with most inquisitional behavior, the early campaign was relatively gentle. Books were written to ridicule “alternative” medicine, AMA members were forbidden from associating with homeopaths, and AMA pressure began getting homeopaths expelled from medical societies. The Thomsonian school of medicine also came under fire, but as they were generally laypeople, they were not as much of a threat as homeopaths were.

Although it would be a mistake to attribute all of it to a conspiracy, there is a familiar pattern when rival movements are attacked and destroyed. For instance, the Catholic Inquisition got its start in the early 1200s as a response to internal corruption that left the Catholic Church’s religious monopoly in Europe vulnerable to challenges from reformists. By the early 1200s, the Catholic Church was holding ecumenical councils that attempted to curb the corruption in its priestly ranks. Christian Europe’s most socially progressive and cosmopolitan region was France’s Languedoc region. Returning from the Balkans with Crusading soldiers was Catharism, a dualistic sect whose roots predated Christianity. The Cathars lived the austere lives that people imagined that Jesus lived, and the pious example of the Cathars’ spiritual practice was a marked contrast to the Catholic Church’s priests’. The Cathars took vows of poverty, fasted, and apparently the most advanced of them could heal with a touch. Catharism spread like wildfire throughout Languedoc, and by the early 1200s, about half of the Languedoc region was Cathar. The Church had to deal with other threats in those days. The followers of Peter Waldo comprised an internal challenge to the Church’s corruption. Waldo’s attempts to reform the Church and bring Christianity back to its humble roots got him excommunicated.

The early attempts to curb Catharism were largely restricted to counter-preaching, and Dominic led the effort to bring the Languedoc citizens back to the fold. He had little success, and Pope Innocent III crafted an effective solution. In businessmen’s parlance, it consisted of putting cement shoes on the competition while marketing an ersatz version of their product. Innocent called a Crusade on Languedoc and simultaneously sanctioned the mendicant orders, the Dominicans and Franciscans, who imitated the austere practices of the Cathars. The Albigensian Crusade was waged over decades and completely depopulated parts of France and killed about one million people. The Cathar threat to the Catholic Church’s monopoly was wiped out in a prodigious bloodbath, and the Church enjoyed another three centuries of religious racketeering, until Martin Luther came along. The Dominicans and Franciscans became the Inquisition’s foot soldiers, enforcing the faith with the rack, hot tongs, and flaming stakes.

In significant ways, the offensive mounted by orthodox medicine is reminiscent of how the Catholic Church operated. Orthodox medicine abandoned its more egregious practices. The public rightly feared the heroic bleedings and large doses of “medicines” such as calomel. The highly dilute doses administered by homeopaths had great appeal. During its crusade against the competition, American orthodox medicine curtailed its heroic bleeding practices, as well as its heroic doses of calomel and other “medicines.” It began co-opting homeopathic medicines into its pharmacopoeia. There was a trend ever since the 1830s, when the alternative movements began in earnest, to begin trusting nature again. Orthodox doctors began allowing the body to heal itself, or at least assist it, instead of bludgeoning it with heroic medicine. Orthodox medicine was raiding the alternatives for what it deemed useful, so it could offer a competing product. At the same time, orthodox medicine tried putting cement shoes on its competition. Getting homeopaths kicked out of medical societies were some of the early AMA successes in the 1850s.

The spiritual, political, and social perspectives often have parallel in one’s scientific and professional orientation. The homeopathic movement was not only revolutionary in the medical field, most American homeopaths in the 1850s were also abolitionists and members of the nascent Republican Party. When Abraham Lincoln came into office in 1861, his Secretary of State, William Seward, had a homeopath as his personal physician. Homeopathy enjoyed political support in Washington in the 1860s, which helped to blunt the orthodox assault.

The 1860s through 1880s were the period of greatest influence for homeopathic practitioners. The press and public were fairly unanimous in their criticisms of the orthodox medical establishment, and sympathetic toward homeopathy. By the 1870s, about a million American families were loyal to homeopathy. In 1878, a yellow-fever epidemic swept from New Orleans into the Mississippi Valley. There were about 20,000 deaths. Yellow fever was the most feared disease in the South, and official commissions were launched to investigate the 1878 epidemic. One commission investigated the records of homeopathic physicians where the epidemic raged. It turned out that people treated by homeopaths had a yellow-fever death rate of less than 7%, which was less than half the death rate of the general public. When the results were announced to the USA’s Congress, they were impressed. The attacks on homeopathy by orthodoxy relaxed during those years, although homeopathy had been so demonized in the AMA’s ranks that many orthodox practitioners would go berserk at the mere mention of it. There were various factors that doomed homeopathy. Orthodox medicine’s alliance with the drug companies loomed largely, but the seeds of its destruction came largely from within its ranks.

Hahnemann’s system was developed through experience with patients, and his practice made the homeopath both diagnostician and pharmacist. The homeopathic pharmacopoeia was vast, and the proper application of it took years of careful study. Homeopathy was not for quick study artists. There was no one-size-fits-all treatment, no universal “medicine” such as calomel, no assembly line to run the patients through. Not surprisingly, a movement arose in homeopathy that tried making homeopathy easier to learn and use. Its practitioners were influenced by the universal prescriptions that orthodox practitioners were handing out. With the relaxation of attacks from orthodox medicine, the internal division of homeopathy became evident. In 1880, it divided into the “purists” who followed Hahnemann’s teachings to the letter and the revisionists who tried making homeopathy easier to learn and apply. The subsequent internecine warfare was the major reason that the homeopathic movement began disintegrating in the late 19th century. The homeopaths that I have dealt with or been aware of in my life have usually been from the “purist” school.

Another factor deserves mention. Although the heroic treatments of orthodox medicine were feared by millions of people, and rightfully so, they were by no means the majority of Americans, at least to the point of refusing to submit to them. Heroic medicine enjoyed the benefit of being spectacular. When a patient ingested calomel, the effect was dramatic. Something happened, even if it nearly killed the patient. I have experienced and watched homeopathy produce instant and dramatic results, for many ailments. For chronic conditions, however, the treatment could take many months, as the body gradually healed itself, in subtle fashion. There was often self-discipline involved with homeopathic treatment, and most people preferred to take a quick-acting pill for their afflictions. That dynamic can readily be seen today. True health in today’s USA comes from taking care of one’s self. Eating well, exercising, refraining from tobacco, alcohol, and other stimulants/depressants, and other aspects of a healthy regimen require some self-discipline, which relatively few people exercise. Most people would rather take a pill to make their symptoms disappear so they can continue to pursue their addictions and deadly lifestyles. Symptom suppression is the essence of Western medicine today, and its appeal is largely to people who refuse to accept responsibility for their health. Most want a pill or spectacular intervention, such as surgery, to make the problem “go away.”

The homeopathic movement largely had itself to blame for its demise, but its internal weakness was also exploited by other competitors, the most damaging among them orthodox doctors, who allied with the burgeoning pharmaceutical empires. The homeopathic remedies administered by the “purists” were highly dilute and never mixed with other substances. It was the opposite approach to the polypharmacy of the proprietary medicine craze that gripped orthodoxy during the Gilded Age.

The final blow to homeopathy, however, was dealt by diversifying robber barons, John D. Rockefeller and Andrew Carnegie in particular. Rockefeller and Carnegie amassed enormous fortunes during the Gilded Age, through ingenuity and ruthlessness. As they came to dominate their respective industries, they branched out and became “philanthropists.” Their “philanthropy” was more directed toward social engineering than humanitarian activity. Rockefeller and Carnegie exercised “institutional control” over American medicine.

By 1900, homeopathic schools had largely abandoned Hahnemann’s methods, and the “make homeopathy easy” faction dominated. That “short cut” school of homeopathy was close in spirit and practice to orthodox medicine, and both pumped great numbers of graduates into the medical marketplace. Homeopathy suffered from the internal division, and its colleges relied almost solely upon student fees. Homeopathy probably also lost its effectiveness as Hahnemann’s methods were abandoned. The same economic situation in relation to student fees existed in orthodox medical schools until 1910 and the Flexner Report, which was funded by the Carnegie Endowment. Medical schools that received Flexner’s approval received Carnegie and Rockefeller funding, while those that failed to gain approval did not. Not surprisingly, the favored paradigm prevailed, and the AMA and drug industry allied itself with Rockefeller and Carnegie and formed a power structure that dominates Western medicine to this day.

The AMA worked hand-in-hand with Flexner, and government was soon a player. State boards refused to license doctors that did not come from AMA-approved schools. That interlocking institutional control spelled the death knell for homeopathy. In 1900, there were 22 homeopathic colleges. In 1918, there were only seven. Homeopathic colleges were not the only casualties of the institutional control that Rockefeller, Carnegie, the AMA, licensing boards, and drug companies would exercise over medicine. That process also closed most medical schools for women and blacks. The AMA successfully kept blacks out of medicine until the 1960s, with an effort led by Morris Fishbein. The alleged strategy was bringing science and education to medicine, but it was also obviously a power play to consolidate wealth and power. Ironically, Rockefeller would not take the drugs that his empire promoted. His personal physician was a homeopath, and John D. lived to be nearly 100 years old. To gain some insight into Rockefeller’s motivation, a quote from Medical Dark Ages is appropriate:

“…a surgeon told John D. (Rockefeller) that everyone should have an appendectomy before the age of 16 as a preventative.  The oil wizard saw the point at once.  ‘Why, you’ve got a better thing than Standard Oil!’, he exclaimed.” – Nat Morris, The Cancer Blackout.

Rockefeller was creating paradigms in Western society, using his ill-gotten money to shape and dominate institutions that he funded, and it goes far beyond the drugs and knives paradigm that rules Western medicine. Soon before he began taking over medicine, he was reshaping the University of Chicago and remaking it to his liking. The University of Chicago would spawn social control ideologies. John Taylor Gatto, one of America’s finest teachers, noted that today’s grade schools were partly designed by theorists from the University of Chicago, where they honed their “instruments of scientific management of a mass population.”  Gatto’s thesis is that our educational system “dumbs us down,” so that we can be controlled.  From 1990 through 1997, in the wake of the Soviet Empire’s collapse, in every year but two, the Nobel Prize in Economic Sciences was awarded to a University of Chicago economist, and their work was generally concerned with scientific, capitalistic means of managing the world economy. There was about zero humanitarian impulse in Rockefeller’s “philanthropy.” He only became excited when pondering how rich he would become.

The knives and drugs paradigm prevailed due to considerations of wealth and power, not because it works. In 1914, a few years after the publication of Flexner’s report, Rockefeller strikebreakers turned machine guns on a camp of striking miners in Colorado, killing 40 people, including women and children. Exploiting workers was always the way that capitalists primarily amassed their fortunes. In the 1990s, a member of Dennis Lee’s organization had lunch with a Rockefeller heir. The heir said that he knew of no rich American family (at the level of dynastic wealth) that made its fortune honestly. In America at least, behind every great fortune is a great crime. Even the “radical” Carnegie was a crafty strikebreaker, and the bloody Homestead Strike stained his reign. Machine-gunning one’s employees could be effective but was a crude method of exerting control. Rockefeller and the other robber barons pioneered and refined methods of manipulating public opinion and shaping the public mind. Rockefeller’s image in the wake of the Ludlow Massacre, especially as it became evident that he authorized it, was at about the level of Attila the Hun, and Rockefeller then waged one of history’s first public relations campaigns. He hired Ivy Lee in 1914 to help manage the Rockefeller Empire’s image. Lee is considered the leading pioneer of today’s public relations industry, working first for J.P. Morgan, then for Rockefeller. John D. Rockefeller soon engaged in the charade of carrying around a bag of dimes, handing one to everyone he met.

Before Rockefeller and Carnegie became involved, the AMA was getting its act together. In 1899, the AMA hired George Simmons as the new editor for JAMA.  Harris Coulter described Simmons as somebody with considerable “political abilities.” JAMA was a deeply hypocritical publication. Its primary source of revenue was drug ads, and the ads it ran for “secret ingredient” and “proprietary” medicines violated the AMA’s code of ethics. In the 1890s, the AMA came under fire from state boards and other organizations for its unethical ads, and was on its way to becoming a laughing stock. Simmons rescued the AMA, largely by turning JAMA into a money machine by closely allying itself with the drug industry. Drug ads funded the AMA, especially after Simmons became involved in 1899. Coulter did not delve into Simmons’s credentials in his work, but Eustace Mullins did, in his Murder by Injection, as have others.

An Englishman, Simmons settled in the Midwest in 1870 and began a journalism career. After several years as editor of the Nebraska Farmer, Simmons opened a medical practice, advertising that he specialized in homeopathy and the “diseases of women.” He apparently was an abortionist when the AMA was campaigning to ban abortion. Simmons advertised that he received his training and diploma at Rotunda Hospital in Dublin, Ireland. That hospital never issued diplomas. There is no evidence that Simmons ever received any medical training. Simmons then got a diploma from Rush Medical School. There is no evidence that Simmons ever set foot on the medical school campus. He apparently received a mail order degree. Simmons appears to have been the classic “quack.” However, Simmons was ambitious and resourceful. He organized a Nebraska chapter of the AMA. In 1899, he was invited to Chicago to take over the editorship of JAMA.  Simmons saw that the AMA was not properly seizing its opportunities. He quickly named himself the AMA’s secretary and general manager. Simmons then found a capable assistant, a man who had been arrested for embezzlement as the Secretary of the Kentucky Board of Health, who may have bought his way to a pardon, and was then encouraged to leave the state. He became Simmons’s right hand man.

Simmons turned the AMA into a gold mine when he initiated an approval racket. For a price, the AMA gave its “Seal of Approval” to drugs. It was a form of extortion, and the AMA engaged in no scientific research. Their “research” was a form of “green research.” Simmons, like a shrewd horse trader, would set his price based on how badly a drug company wanted the AMA’s Seal of Approval. The racket soon led to a troubled situation with Wallace Abbott, the founder of Abbott Laboratories. Abbott refused to knuckle under to Simmons’s blackmail, and therefore the AMA never approved Abbott’s drugs. One day, so the story goes, Abbott went to see Simmons and showed him the investigative file that he had built on Simmons’s “career.” Simmons had sex charges brought by some of his patients, and charges of negligence in the deaths of others. That, combined with the fact that Simmons had no credible medical credentials, caused a sudden change of heart at the AMA. Abbott’s drugs were suddenly approved every time, and Abbott did not have to pay for them.

Simmons was soon raking it in hand over fist. JAMA’s advertising revenue rose from $34,000 per year in 1899 to $89,000 in 1903. By 1909, JAMA was making $150,000 per year and became the AMA’s cash cow. Other racketeering strategies involved threatening firms that advertised anywhere except in the pages of JAMA.  Simmons was ingenious in making JAMA the icon it became, exerting institutional control over the up and coming industry. Simmons’s efforts made the AMA and drug companies into natural allies of the Rockefeller and Carnegie foundations.

Simmons recruited Morris Fishbein to the AMA in 1913.  Simmons was a wealthy man by the 1920s, sitting at the AMA’s helm. He openly had a mistress and attempted to get rid of his wife. A standard technique in those days was having one’s wife committed to an insane asylum. Simmons heavily drugged his wife and then tried convincing her that she was going insane. His strategy backfired. Mrs. Simmons took her husband to court in 1924 and the sensational trial ruined Simmons’s image. The trial inspired numerous books, plays, and movies, the most famous of which was Gaslight, starring Charles Boyer and Ingrid Bergman. Simmons stepped down at the AMA and his protégé, Morris Fishbein, took over. Fishbein ran American medicine with an iron fist for the next 25 years, becoming a household name and a rich man.

Fishbein soon extended the drug approval racket to food: for a price, food would garner the AMA’s Seal of Acceptance. The testing involved seemed limited to seeing how much money was in the bank account of the companies seeking AMA approval. At the same time that Fishbein was announcing the Seal of Approval and citing two tuna companies as meeting the AMA’s stringent requirements, the FDA was seizing shipments of those very brands because “they consisted in whole or in part of decomposed animal substance.” Fishbein’s first customer for his food approval racket was Land O’Lakes Butter Company, which had been criminally prosecuted many times for adulterating its product to hide spoilage and watering it down. It widely advertised its new, AMA-approved, status. The AMA’s Seal of Approval racket for food lasted until the 1940s, and it always teetered on the verge of damage lawsuits as it performed virtually no testing on its “approved” foods. The drug Seal of Approval racket, however, proved long lasting, but drugs comprised only one pillar of the developing racket. The other was surgery. When anesthesia and antiseptics made surgery respectable, the surgeons sought to make surgery into a monopoly.

Surgery was not rescued from its barbaric status in the United States until the 1880s. Keen was not the only American pioneer of antiseptic procedures. The most famous is William Halsted. Germany, with its focus on laboratory science, became the center of medical research and training during the last half of the 19th century, not France or England. Halsted was a rich boy from Yale who studied in Germany and brought back the German philosophy of medical practice. Halsted pioneered sterile surgical procedures in Baltimore. As happened often in those days, Halsted became a cocaine and morphine addict, and never beat his addiction. Along with pioneering sterile surgery, Halsted also refined the practice of invasive surgery. Halsted invented the radical mastectomy.

With Halsted’s innovations helping it along, surgery became the favored, even sole, way to treat cancer in the late 19th century. Cancer is a disease of civilization, and the greatest doctors of history knew that treating cancer by attacking the tumor was futile. Cancer was also seen long ago as a disease of the “humors,” i.e., the body’s fluids. Western medicine gradually abandoned the humoral perspective to adopt the “solidist” one. Studying and treating the humors (blood, lymph, and bile) was largely abandoned in favor of treating the body’s “solids.” Such a change was partly based on the cell theories of Virchow and others, but the rise of surgery also contributed greatly, because it is impossible to use a scalpel on blood.

The world’s most influential cancer research institution is Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center in New York. Its “spiritual founder” was J. Marion Sims. Sims received minimal training during the 1840s before he began performing experimental surgeries on slave women.  Slave women were at the bottom of America’s social hierarchy (except for the Indians who were being dispossessed and exterminated), and as such made ideal subjects for human experiments. Performed without anesthesia, Sims’s surgeries were accomplished by having friends hold down the slaves as he operated. According to his sympathetic biographer, his operations were “little short of murderous.” Sims’s friends could only endure about one stint of holding down his experimental subjects, as the subjects’ thrashing and shrieking were too much for them to endure. When local plantation owners refused to lend Sims any more subjects for his experiments, he bought a slave woman for $500 and performed 30 operations on her in a few months. After a few years of his experimental surgeries, he may have been run out of town, as he had the reputation of being some kind of Dr. Frankenstein.

Sims abruptly moved to New York City from the South, and in 1855 helped found Women’s Hospital, a charity hospital. He again began performing experimental surgeries, that time on immigrant women, and the Dr. Frankenstein rumors began anew. In the 1870s, he began performing experimental cancer surgeries. His brutal experiments, called life-threatening by the hospital trustees, combined with his open contempt of his female subjects, got him expelled from the hospital. Sims cultivated wealthy women as his professional clientele (his specialty was operating on vesico-vaginal fistulas), and those contacts got him reinstated. An Astor heir died of cancer, and the Astor family offered the Women’s Hospital $150,000 if they would open a cancer treatment wing of the hospital. The trustees associated cancer treatment and research with Sims’s barbarities and hesitated to accept the money. Sims double-crossed the trustees and negotiated directly with the Astors to set up a new hospital with the money. His negotiation worked, although he died before New York Cancer Hospital opened in 1884. He would have been its first director had he lived. The name was changed to Memorial Hospital in the 1890s, and to its current name in the 1950s. Cancer treatment by surgery grew during the late 19th century and well into the 20th. Even more drastic surgeries were devised to treat cancer. Using war terminology and imagery, one cancer treatment that removed the entire jaw was known as the “commando” because it reminded the doctors of the slashing attacks of World War I commandos. Memorial Hospital surgeons invented procedures that virtually hollowed out the entire body, trying to get every last potential piece of cancerous flesh. Another innovative surgery at Memorial Hospital was called a hemicorporectomy, where half the body would be carved away (everything below the pelvis) as a way to treat advanced pelvic region malignancy. Many patients elected to die rather than submit to such surgeries.

James Douglas, who owned the world’s largest copper mine, also owned large pitchblende deposits, from which come radium and uranium. Douglas began experimenting with radium as a cure all, and not long before World War I became the leading “philanthropist” of Memorial Hospital. His $100,000 donation was attached to the condition that Memorial Hospital would begin using radium treatments for cancer. With the adoption of radium as “medicine,” the price of radium instantly increased by more than 1,000%. Douglas died in 1913, probably from radiation poisoning. By the 1920s, Memorial Hospital’s radium treatments constituted its single largest source of income.

In 1927, John D. Rockefeller and his son began contributing millions of dollars to Memorial Hospital, including money and land to build a new hospital in the 1930s. The same year that the Rockefellers began “donating” to Memorial Hospital, Standard Oil of New Jersey signed its first agreement with I.G. Farben. Farben was Europe’s largest and most notorious cartel. Farben ran the rubber works at Auschwitz, and invented Sarin, Tabun, and the Zyklon B used in the gas chambers. In 1934, the Rockefeller Empire sent its PR wizard Ivy Lee to Germany to help improve Farben and the Third Reich’s image. The Rockefeller Empire worked hand-in-hand with Nazi Germany, as did many other American industrialists, including Hitler’s hero, Henry Ford. The Rockefellers even renewed their contract with Farben in 1939, and the contract stated that they would continue doing business even if the USA and Germany went to war, an agreement that was kept clear until 1942, after Germany had declared war on the USA. It was not until the American government investigated the Rockefeller companies, and one investigator called their relationship with Germany bordering on “treason,” with a resultant publicity black eye, that the Rockefellers discontinued their open support of Nazi Germany, although they apparently kept dealing with Hitler’s regime clear to the end of World War II.

The Rockefeller/Farben connection influenced Memorial Hospital to begin pursuing chemotherapy research before World War II broke out, and Standard Oil executive Frank Howard sat on Memorial Hospital’s Research Committee. Before World War II was over, Howard recruited two General Motors executives, Alfred P. Sloan and Charles Kettering, into becoming donors for an ambitious plan to make Memorial Hospital into a research and treatment center. Kettering also funded Kettering Laboratories in Cincinnati, which was notable for producing “research” that proved the “benign” properties of industrial substances such as lead, fluoride, and aluminum. Sloan was a long-time representative of the Morgan family interests, and the Rockefeller and Morgan interests shared power in running Memorial Sloan-Kettering. Today more than ever, Wall Street runs Memorial Sloan-Kettering, which dominates the direction of Western cancer research and treatment. “Corporate philanthropy” is an oxymoron. Corporations “give” money with an eye toward the benefits that might accrue in the end. Everything that a corporation does is ultimately designed to increase its profits. Earning a profit is the only reason that corporations exist, but few will ever state it that baldly.

Today’s cancer treatment paradigm attacks the tumor as a way to eradicate cancer. What did the great doctors of history have to say about attacking cancer tumors? From Medical Dark Ages I obtained these quotes:

“It is better not to apply any treatment in cases of occult cancer; for if treated (by surgery), the patients die quickly; but if not treated, they hold out for a long time.” – Hippocrates, (460-370 BCE).

(Advanced cancer is)” irritated by treatment; and the more so the more vigorous it is.

“Some have used caustic medicaments, some the cautery, some excision with a scalpel; but no medicament has ever given relief; the parts cauterized are excited immediately to an increase until they cause death.

“After excision, even when a scar has formed, nonetheless the disease has returned, and caused death; while …the majority of patients, although no violent measures are applied in the attempt to remove the tumor, but only mild applications in order to sooth it, attain a ripe old age in spite of it.” – Celsus, (1st century CE).

“When [a tumor] is of long standing and large, you should leave it alone. For myself have never been able to cure any such, nor have I seen anyone else succeed before me.” – Abu’l Qasim, (936-1013 CE).

“It should be forbidden and severely punished to remove cancer by cutting, burning, cautery, and other fiendish tortures. It is from nature that the disease comes, and from nature comes the cure, not from physicians.” – Paracelsus, (1493-1541 CE).

The same mentality was held by the Hawaiian kahunas.  The kahuna lore stated that “If it is (cancer), do not treat it.”

The heroic medicine of Benjamin Rush was diametrically opposed to such a sentiment. He wrote that one of the “Vulgar Errors in Medicine” was to “let tumors alone.”

With surgery coming into vogue, it became a monopoly as a way to treat cancer. Today, there are basically three legal ways to treat cancer in America: surgery, radiation, and chemotherapy. The second legal way to treat cancer was discovered in the 1890s. How was that pioneer treated? Again, from Medical Dark Ages:

“The surgeons. They controlled medicine, and they regarded the X-ray as a threat to surgery. At the time surgery was the only approved method of treating cancer. They meant to keep it the only approved method by ignoring or rejecting any new methods or ideas. This is why I was called a ‘quack’ and nearly ejected from hospitals where I had practiced for years.” – Dr. Emil Grubbé.

“Dr. Emil Grubbé, …discovered…X-ray therapy (for cancer) in 1896…X-ray was not recognized as an agent for treating cancer by the American College of Surgeons until 1937…Dr. Grubbé…still was not recognized as late as 1951.” – in Herbert Bailey, Vitamin E, Your Key to a Healthy Heart

The third legal way, chemotherapy, came directly from World War II chemical warfare experiments. Using chemicals to treat cancer had been around since Paracelsus, but the chemicals killed the patients more often than not, since they were based on arsenic, lead, and other deadly substances. In the early 20th century, chemical treatments and finding the “magic bullet” to kill cancer cells became an intensive area of study. In the 1930s, chemotherapy research was noted for its deadly and barbaric effects, and those who used surgery and radiation battled against chemotherapy. World War II was a watershed in the use of chemicals. DDT was first used during World War II, the Nazis invented nerve gases, the allies invented napalm and nuclear weapons, and the notion of “better living through chemistry” became entrenched due to the experience of World War II.

The racketeering impulse has been with Western medicine for many years and is deeply embedded today. The rise of the Western medical paradigm coincided with the rise of the corporation and new kinds of empires. The reason that American medical doctors are the highest-paid professionals on Earth is not because they perform valuable work. They are technicians in what is arguably the West’s greatest racket, in which the power of life and death is in the hands of the world’s most lucrative professions and industries. The fact that only violent methods of cancer treatment are legal is no accident. Here are two quotes from Medical Dark Ages:

“The thing that bugs me is that people think the FDA is protecting them. It isn’t. What the FDA is doing and what the public thinks it’s doing are as different as night and day.” Dr. Herbert Ley, Commissioner of the FDA. (San Francisco Chronicle, 1-2-70).

(In response to above quote) “What is the FDA doing? As will be shown by the material that follows, the FDA is “doing” three things:

“First, it is providing a means whereby key individuals on its payroll are able to obtain both power and wealth through granting special favors to certain politically influential groups that are subject to its regulation. This activity is similar to the ‘protection racket’ of organized crime: for a price, one can induce FDA administrators to provide ‘protection’ from the FDA itself.

“Secondly, as a result of this political favoritism, the FDA has become a primary factor in that formula whereby cartel-oriented companies in the food and drug industry are able to use the police powers of government to harass or destroy their free-market competitors.

“And thirdly, the FDA occasionally does some genuine public good with whatever energies it has left over after serving the vested political and commercial interest of its first two activities.”  – G. Edward Griffin, World Without Cancer.

The insurance companies are [also] an integral part of the racket, keeping the money from the alternatives because they are “not approved.” “Not approved” becomes a self-fulfilling Catch-22 by mainstream medicine, as they refuse to investigate alternatives, so therefore they are not approved. It goes even further, as laws are passed making it a criminal offense for a doctor to use an “unapproved” treatment. It is an impressive use of circular logic to produce an insulated racket.

Excerpt from The Medical Racket

See Part II here.