Dr. Max Gerson
Max Gerson, M.D. was born in Wongrowitz, Germany (1881). He attended the universities of Breslau, Wuerzburg, Berlin, and Freiburg. Suffering from severe migraines, Dr. Gerson focused his initial experimentation with diet on preventing his headaches. One of Dr. Gerson’s patients discovered in the course of his treatment, that the “migraine diet” had cured his skin tuberculosis. This discovery led Gerson to further study the diet, and he went on to successfully treat many tuberculosis patients. His work eventually came to the attention of famed thoracic surgeon, Ferdinand Sauerbruch, M.D.
Under Sauerbruch’s supervision, Dr. Gerson established a special skin tuberculosis treatment program at the Munich University Hospital. In a carefully monitored clinical trial, 446 out of 450 skin tuberculosis patients treated with the Gerson diet recovered completely. Dr. Sauerbruch and Dr. Gerson simultaneously published articles in a dozen of the world’s leading medical journals, establishing the Gerson treatment as the first cure for skin tuberculosis.
At this time, Dr. Gerson attracted the friendship of Nobel prize winner Albert Schweitzer, M.D., by curing Schweitzer’s wife of lung tuberculosis after all conventional treatments had failed. Gerson and Schweitzer remained friends for life, and maintained regular correspondence. Dr. Schweitzer followed Gerson’s progress as the dietary therapy was successfully applied to heart disease, kidney failure, and finally – cancer. Schweitzer’s own type II diabetes was cured by treatment with Gerson’s therapy.
In 1938, Dr. Gerson passed his boards and was licensed to practice in the state of New York. For twenty years, he treated hundreds of cancer patients who had been given up to die after all conventional treatments had failed.
In 1946, Gerson demonstrated recovered patients before the Pepper-Neely Congressional Subcommittee, during hearings on a bill to fund research into cancer treatment. Although only a few peer-reviewed journals were receptive to Gerson’s then “radical” idea that diet could affect health, he continued to publish articles on his therapy and case histories of healed patients.
In 1958, after thirty years of clinical experimentation, Gerson published A Cancer Therapy: Results of 50 Cases. This medical monograph details the theories, treatment, and results achieved by a great physician. Gerson died in 1959, eulogized by long-time friend, Albert Schweitzer M.D.:
“…I see in him 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. Yet, 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 has cured will now attest to the truth of his ideas.”
You can read the full story of Dr. Max Gerson’s life and the development of the Gerson Therapy in his biography, Dr. Max Gerson: Healing the Hopeless, written by his grandson, Howard Straus.
Under Sauerbruch’s supervision, Dr. Gerson established a special skin tuberculosis treatment program at the Munich University Hospital. In a carefully monitored clinical trial, 446 out of 450 skin tuberculosis patients treated with the Gerson diet recovered completely. Dr. Sauerbruch and Dr. Gerson simultaneously published articles in a dozen of the world’s leading medical journals, establishing the Gerson treatment as the first cure for skin tuberculosis.
At this time, Dr. Gerson attracted the friendship of Nobel prize winner Albert Schweitzer, M.D., by curing Schweitzer’s wife of lung tuberculosis after all conventional treatments had failed. Gerson and Schweitzer remained friends for life, and maintained regular correspondence. Dr. Schweitzer followed Gerson’s progress as the dietary therapy was successfully applied to heart disease, kidney failure, and finally – cancer. Schweitzer’s own type II diabetes was cured by treatment with Gerson’s therapy.
In 1938, Dr. Gerson passed his boards and was licensed to practice in the state of New York. For twenty years, he treated hundreds of cancer patients who had been given up to die after all conventional treatments had failed.
In 1946, Gerson demonstrated recovered patients before the Pepper-Neely Congressional Subcommittee, during hearings on a bill to fund research into cancer treatment. Although only a few peer-reviewed journals were receptive to Gerson’s then “radical” idea that diet could affect health, he continued to publish articles on his therapy and case histories of healed patients.
In 1958, after thirty years of clinical experimentation, Gerson published A Cancer Therapy: Results of 50 Cases. This medical monograph details the theories, treatment, and results achieved by a great physician. Gerson died in 1959, eulogized by long-time friend, Albert Schweitzer M.D.:
“…I see in him 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. Yet, 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 has cured will now attest to the truth of his ideas.”
You can read the full story of Dr. Max Gerson’s life and the development of the Gerson Therapy in his biography, Dr. Max Gerson: Healing the Hopeless, written by his grandson, Howard Straus.
Charlotte Gerson
Charlotte’s long and varied life began in the small town of Bielefeld, in Wesfalia, where her parents and two older sisters lived peacefully following the upheavals of the First World War. Her father’s research and discoveries in the field of nutrition only touched the pretty little girl occasionally when, red-cheeked and smudged from the sandbox, she would be called in to demonstrate to skeptical patients that yes, one could be healthy without eating sausages and cream cakes.
When later contact with her father’s tuberculosis patients infected her with a bone condition, she healed on his great method and never again suffered from a life-threatening illness.
It is little understood outside her family the stress and fear experienced by Charlotte and her sisters with the onset of Nazism and the family’s flight across Europe: first from Berlin to Vienna, then Vienna to Paris, then to London and finally across the Atlantic to the United States. One can follow these movements on a map but how did they affect an eleven-year-old child who had to change schools, learn two new languages and sit with second graders in chairs not built for anyone older. Furniture in storage, father seeking possible havens for his family and recognition for his work, her mother bearing the full burden of moving house and educating her daughters.
Charlotte often tells how the teacher announced her departure from London on the day of King Edward VII’s abdication. A special assembly was called in her school and it was solemnly announced that the King had abdicated. “And today, Charlotte Gerson is also leaving us.”
When at last the family settled in New York, Charlotte attended high school and subsequently Smith College.
She married young, a handsome photographer, Irwin Straus, whose family had also fled the Holocaust, and quickly became a soldier’s bride, when, in 1941, a day after Pearl Harbor, Irwin enlisted. She followed him through basic training camps and actually had her first experience in public speaking before a group of army wives, recounting her trials and the situation in Hitler’s Europe.
Howard was born in 1943, while his father was enlisted, and Margaret (Peggy), named after Max Gerson’s wife, in 1947. In the postwar period, Charlotte and her husband built a business together, but she always studied the application of her father’s therapy in patients, spending weekends visiting his clinic in upstate New York, making rounds with him, and assisting him in many ways. She loved to read the medical journals she found in his office. This was always her real passion.
Dr. Gerson died just one year after the publication of A Cancer Therapy – Results of 50 Cases. Charlotte continued to publish his book, and as it came into the hands of organizations dedicated to exploring natural therapies, she was asked to attend health conventions as a speaker. Her lectures became famous, her passion and conviction able to convey to a non medical audience the logic and power of her father’s wonderful work.
In the mid seventies Charlotte and Norman Fritz founded the Gerson Institute. At first they were without help and wrote, printed, and stuffed into envelopes all the announcements, testimonials and appeals, travelled to conventions, printed and sold Dr. Gerson’s books and talked incessantly to patients and practitioners on the telephone.
Charlotte struggled to organize clinical situations together with doctors, starting in Los Angeles, then in South Bend, Indiana, and finally in various locations in Mexico. Her fame as a speaker grew and she was a familiar figure at many health conventions such as:
The Cancer Control Society
The National Health Federation
The Modern Manna Group
The Consumer Health Organization of Canada
and many private organizations. For over 30 years, Charlotte has trained physicians in the Gerson Therapy at the Mexican Hospitals. She went there every day at the beginning and then twice a week, tirelessly giving of her vitality and energy to frightened, doubtful patients, and achieving incredible results.
In 1996 Charlotte retired as President of the Gerson Institute and limited her activity to private consulting, teaching, and lecturing. She has given a lecture to a “Natural Health” group at the British Parliament; at the Wolfgang Goethe University in Frankfurt, and the London University, various Irish University locations, naturopathic colleges and in Italy.
Charlotte wrote ceaselessly on many subjects related to the Gerson Therapy, general health, and recovered patients. She regularly contributed to the Gerson Institute Healing Newsletter and her articles have been reprinted in magazines worldwide.
In 2002, she published a series of nine “booklets” responding to the public’s request for “Patients recovered from their kind of cancer”. These booklets each contain some 35 pages, with the titles of Healing [name of cancer] the Gerson Way. They are very popular since each of them shows some dozen recovered patients of that cancer.
Charlotte participated in three excellent DVD’s by Stephen Kroschel all describing the Gerson Therapy and showing recovered patients. The first one, “The Gerson Miracle” won first prize at the Beverly Hills Film Festival in 2004. Then came, “Dying to Have Known” which describes the attackers’ claims and counters them with Surgeons and Professors showing cured, formerly terminal, patients treated with the Gerson Therapy and recovered. The last film was "The Beautiful Truth" (2008).
Charlotte’s book, Healing the Gerson Way – Defeating Cancer and Other Chronic Diseases, written in cooperation with Beata Bishop, came out in August, 2007. It is new, in excellent style, eminently readable and usable for self-healing. It also has almost 100 pages of Gerson recipes. The book has been translated into 12 languages, with four more translations slated to be published in 2015.
She has also published Healing Diabetes the Gerson Way, Healing Arthritis the Gerson Way and Healing High Blood Pressure the Gerson Way.
Right until she reached 92, Charlotte visited patients once a week at the clinic in Mexico and her lectures and question times there were greeted with enthusiasm by everyone, her wonderful energy still able to inspire them to hope and heal.
After a second serious fall in the summer of 2014, she never recovered the ability to walk unassisted, and though she was without pain, and in good spirits, she was no longer able to do the work she loved.
In August 2016, Charlotte moved to Italy to spend the rest of her life with her daughter Margaret.
Charlotte Gerson passed away on February 10th 2019, peacefully, a month before her 97th birthday.
We are forever thankful to the Gerson family and Howard and Margaret Straus who continue do to their grandfathers and mothers work.
When later contact with her father’s tuberculosis patients infected her with a bone condition, she healed on his great method and never again suffered from a life-threatening illness.
It is little understood outside her family the stress and fear experienced by Charlotte and her sisters with the onset of Nazism and the family’s flight across Europe: first from Berlin to Vienna, then Vienna to Paris, then to London and finally across the Atlantic to the United States. One can follow these movements on a map but how did they affect an eleven-year-old child who had to change schools, learn two new languages and sit with second graders in chairs not built for anyone older. Furniture in storage, father seeking possible havens for his family and recognition for his work, her mother bearing the full burden of moving house and educating her daughters.
Charlotte often tells how the teacher announced her departure from London on the day of King Edward VII’s abdication. A special assembly was called in her school and it was solemnly announced that the King had abdicated. “And today, Charlotte Gerson is also leaving us.”
When at last the family settled in New York, Charlotte attended high school and subsequently Smith College.
She married young, a handsome photographer, Irwin Straus, whose family had also fled the Holocaust, and quickly became a soldier’s bride, when, in 1941, a day after Pearl Harbor, Irwin enlisted. She followed him through basic training camps and actually had her first experience in public speaking before a group of army wives, recounting her trials and the situation in Hitler’s Europe.
Howard was born in 1943, while his father was enlisted, and Margaret (Peggy), named after Max Gerson’s wife, in 1947. In the postwar period, Charlotte and her husband built a business together, but she always studied the application of her father’s therapy in patients, spending weekends visiting his clinic in upstate New York, making rounds with him, and assisting him in many ways. She loved to read the medical journals she found in his office. This was always her real passion.
Dr. Gerson died just one year after the publication of A Cancer Therapy – Results of 50 Cases. Charlotte continued to publish his book, and as it came into the hands of organizations dedicated to exploring natural therapies, she was asked to attend health conventions as a speaker. Her lectures became famous, her passion and conviction able to convey to a non medical audience the logic and power of her father’s wonderful work.
In the mid seventies Charlotte and Norman Fritz founded the Gerson Institute. At first they were without help and wrote, printed, and stuffed into envelopes all the announcements, testimonials and appeals, travelled to conventions, printed and sold Dr. Gerson’s books and talked incessantly to patients and practitioners on the telephone.
Charlotte struggled to organize clinical situations together with doctors, starting in Los Angeles, then in South Bend, Indiana, and finally in various locations in Mexico. Her fame as a speaker grew and she was a familiar figure at many health conventions such as:
The Cancer Control Society
The National Health Federation
The Modern Manna Group
The Consumer Health Organization of Canada
and many private organizations. For over 30 years, Charlotte has trained physicians in the Gerson Therapy at the Mexican Hospitals. She went there every day at the beginning and then twice a week, tirelessly giving of her vitality and energy to frightened, doubtful patients, and achieving incredible results.
In 1996 Charlotte retired as President of the Gerson Institute and limited her activity to private consulting, teaching, and lecturing. She has given a lecture to a “Natural Health” group at the British Parliament; at the Wolfgang Goethe University in Frankfurt, and the London University, various Irish University locations, naturopathic colleges and in Italy.
Charlotte wrote ceaselessly on many subjects related to the Gerson Therapy, general health, and recovered patients. She regularly contributed to the Gerson Institute Healing Newsletter and her articles have been reprinted in magazines worldwide.
In 2002, she published a series of nine “booklets” responding to the public’s request for “Patients recovered from their kind of cancer”. These booklets each contain some 35 pages, with the titles of Healing [name of cancer] the Gerson Way. They are very popular since each of them shows some dozen recovered patients of that cancer.
Charlotte participated in three excellent DVD’s by Stephen Kroschel all describing the Gerson Therapy and showing recovered patients. The first one, “The Gerson Miracle” won first prize at the Beverly Hills Film Festival in 2004. Then came, “Dying to Have Known” which describes the attackers’ claims and counters them with Surgeons and Professors showing cured, formerly terminal, patients treated with the Gerson Therapy and recovered. The last film was "The Beautiful Truth" (2008).
Charlotte’s book, Healing the Gerson Way – Defeating Cancer and Other Chronic Diseases, written in cooperation with Beata Bishop, came out in August, 2007. It is new, in excellent style, eminently readable and usable for self-healing. It also has almost 100 pages of Gerson recipes. The book has been translated into 12 languages, with four more translations slated to be published in 2015.
She has also published Healing Diabetes the Gerson Way, Healing Arthritis the Gerson Way and Healing High Blood Pressure the Gerson Way.
Right until she reached 92, Charlotte visited patients once a week at the clinic in Mexico and her lectures and question times there were greeted with enthusiasm by everyone, her wonderful energy still able to inspire them to hope and heal.
After a second serious fall in the summer of 2014, she never recovered the ability to walk unassisted, and though she was without pain, and in good spirits, she was no longer able to do the work she loved.
In August 2016, Charlotte moved to Italy to spend the rest of her life with her daughter Margaret.
Charlotte Gerson passed away on February 10th 2019, peacefully, a month before her 97th birthday.
We are forever thankful to the Gerson family and Howard and Margaret Straus who continue do to their grandfathers and mothers work.
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Charlotte Gerson about the Gerson Therapy
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Charlotte Gerson about Cancer
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The four basic components of The Gerson Therapy
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Charlotte Gerson's last video interview
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Howard Straus |
Margaret Straus |
is the son of Charlotte Gerson and grandson of Dr. Max Gerson. Howard is the author of the biography Dr. Max Gerson: Healing the Hopeless, runs Gerson Health Media and the non-profit Cancer Research Wellness Institute, as well as having a weekly Internet broadcast on Voice America. Howard lectures and gives seminars within the US and Asia.
*May 23, 1943 - June 10, 2019 Howard Straus passed away on June 10, 2019 at age 76 while walking his dog. Howard collapsed and died, just four months after Charlotte Gerson's passing. |
is the daughter of Charlotte Gerson and granddaughter of Dr. Max Gerson. Margaret introduced the Gerson Therapy into England in the 70s and 80s and presently lectures and teaches the therapy in Italy. Her husband, Giuliano Dego, wrote an exciting investigative novel about Dr. Gerson’s life and times, Doctor Max.
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