In October 1948, Dr. Frederic Mohs of the University of Wisconsin published a paper in the Journal of the American Medical Association describing a chemosurgery paste made of zinc chloride, antimony trisulfide, and bloodroot. He received awards for it. The technique still bears his name and remains the standard of care for high-risk skin cancers today. For twenty-four years before that publication, an Illinois healer named Harry Hoxsey had been applying the identical chemistry to external tumors in his Dallas clinic. He had been arrested roughly one hundred times for doing so. The 1949 Hearst libel trial, four months after Mohs’s paper appeared, featured patient after patient with intact photographs showing growths dissolved by the Hoxsey paste. The American Medical Association’s pre-trial memorandum dismissed Mohs’s work as “purely experimental.” Within a decade, Mohs chemosurgery was textbook medicine and Hoxsey had been driven out of the United States. The chemistry was the same chemistry. Kenny Ausubel’s When Healing Becomes a Crime (Healing Arts Press, 2000) documents, across 469 pages drawn from thirteen years of film and archival research, how the difference between a Nobel-nominated technique and a federally prosecuted quackery came down to the credential of the person applying it and the institutional affiliation under which it was published.
Ausubel is a journalist, filmmaker, and co-founder of the Bioneers conference, and his engagement with the Hoxsey story began with a 1987 documentary, Hoxsey: How Healing Becomes a Crime, which aired on HBO and Cinemax, screened at the Kennedy Center, and received a Project Censored award for a parallel 1989 New Age Journal investigation of the Office of Technology Assessment scandal. The book extends that reporting with primary archival work: the Hoxsey trial transcripts, the FDA’s internal files, Benedict FitzGerald’s 1953 Senate report preserved only in the Congressional Record, the Patricia Spain Ward OTA case studies that were suppressed before the final report was issued, and extensive interviews with Mildred Nelson in Tijuana before her death in January 1999. Ausubel writes from outside institutional medicine but with the discipline of a documentarian who has watched his sources tested on camera. The book was dismissed by the oncology establishment on publication and has never been reviewed in any mainstream medical journal.
The book appeared at a specific moment. In 1991, Congressmen Berkley Bedell and Tom Harkin had used appropriations authority to create the Office of Alternative Medicine inside the National Institutes of Health, as an end run around a National Cancer Institute that had resisted every recommendation from the 1990 OTA report. In 1998 the OAM was upgraded to the National Center for Complementary and Alternative Medicine with a $68 million budget, and in the same year the American Cancer Society quietly discontinued its “Unproven Methods of Cancer Management” blacklist, which had carried the Hoxsey listing for four decades on the basis of a 1958 three-day visit to a Taylor Clinic in British Columbia. Mary Ann Richardson’s 1998 NIH-funded feasibility study of 149 Bio Medical Center patients had identified “noteworthy cases of survival.” Harvard’s David Eisenberg had documented that 42 percent of Americans were using alternative therapies and that out-of-pocket spending on them rivaled total out-of-pocket spending on conventional physician services. The sixty-year monopoly of the AMA, FDA, NCI, and ACS consortium on the question of what counted as cancer research had cracked open, slightly. Ausubel wrote into that opening, with the specific aim of establishing the Hoxsey record before the window closed again.
The book belongs on the shelf alongside the primary terrain literature as a case study of what happens when an inexpensive, non-toxic protocol built on supporting the body’s own eliminative capacity confronts an industry built on patented chemical assault. The full summary, in thirty questions, works through the 1840 origin of the formula in an Illinois horse pasture and the three-generation transmission to Harry Hoxsey; the pharmacology of the nine botanicals in the internal tonic, eight of which appear in Jonathan Hartwell’s National Cancer Institute compendium Plants Used Against Cancer with documented antitumor activity; the 1910 Flexner Report and the Rockefeller and Carnegie funding that followed it, which reduced American medical schools from 162 to 66 and eliminated the Eclectic tradition from which the Hoxsey formula descends; the Memorial Sloan-Kettering and Taxol transfer, in which the National Cancer Institute handed Bristol-Myers Squibb a compound developed with $32 million of public money, generating approximately one billion dollars a year in private revenue; and the parallel suppression of Koch, Krebiozen, Lincoln, Gerson, Burton, and Burzynski on the same template. In 1799, George Washington’s physicians drained roughly five pints of blood from him in a single day for an infection they could not treat, and killed him. The men they called quacks were the ones using plants. The word has not changed. The arrangement has not changed. The documents are publicly available, and they say what they say.
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