Essiac Tea - Calling of an Angel: Rene Caisse and Essiac Tea - 4a

For the last few months of 1938, Rene was busy treating patients at her clinic, while skirmishing with the Commission as it got underway. On October 27, she wrote them a letter declining to turn over her formula before they acknowledged the proof of her work. "I wish to know," she wrote, "whether or not I am to continue my clinic. If you wish me to close, I wish you would notify me to that effect. I do not wish to continue, if I am subject to the penalties of the Kirby Act."

The Commission declined her invitation to close her down. They didn't want to get into that routine again. Instead, Dr. B. L. Guyatt, a professor of anatomy at the University of Toronto and an early supporter of Rene's, was informally enlisted as a mediator. He had good relations on both sides.

On December 30, 1938, when the Commission was ready to begin its investigation of Rene and Essiac, Dr. Guyatt wrote Rene a long letter saying that she should be confident and cooperate fully in presenting her cases, especially those with "a pathological diagnosis and shown clinical progress with a disappearance in part or wholly of signs and symptoms."

Rene wholeheartedly took Dr. Guyatt's advice. That was what she'd really wanted to do all along, anyway: Get those doctors into her clinic and show them what she d been doing.

When the Commission announced to the press that two of it's members-Dr. W C. Wallace of Queens University and Dr. T H. Callahan of Toronto-would be going to Bracebridge in February, 1939, to interview Renes patients, Rene told reporters she was "delighted with the arrangement."

Accompanied by Dr. Guyatt, the Commission members spent two days conducting the sworn-and secret-testimony of several people who had been treated by Rene. Afterwards, some of the patients told reporters that they had traveled long distances at their own expense to tell their stories under oath.

One of them, Mr. George Bruce of Hastings County, was quoted in the Toronto Globe and Mail as saying that he owed his life to Rene Caisse. "I came here all burned up from radium treatments. I was nothing but a withered rat, expecting to die any day. Miss Caisse treated me for six weeks, and now I am 100 percent better."

Mrs. J.C. Forsythe, of Utterston, told reporters that she testified that Miss Caisse had initially refused to treat her because she didn't have a copy of her doctor's diagnosis. "Finally Miss Caisse agreed to give me treatments. I was a cripple when I came here, and was at death's door. Now I cook for a big family, do all my own housework and all the other chores that a farm wife has to do. I owe my life to Miss Caisse."

Since the hearings were held in secret, Rene refused comment to the press, except to say she was pleased with the Commission's thoroughness and fairness. Privately she told friends that the doctors had examined some of her former patients and admitted to her-and them-that they were now free of cancer. Rene was thrilled at this latest turn of events.

But the main event was scheduled for early in March, 1939. Public hearings before the full Commission were to be held at the Royal York Hotel in Toronto. This was what Rene and her patients had been waiting for, and when it came they were ready. So many of her supporters showed up that Rene had to rent one of the hotel's ballrooms as a gathering place. Among those present were 387 former patients, from all over Canada, prepared to wait their turn to be sworn to oath and tell their stories.

The Commission wasn't interested in hearing from 387 witnesses. "She's got an army of people here," Commissioner Ualin complained. Ultimately, pleading the pressures of time, the Commission allowed only 49 to testify.

The hundreds of pages of transcript of those 49 sworn witnesses is filled with heart-rending testimony. To a person they were convinced that Essiac had helped them to regain their health. Some of them told of partial and continuing recoveries when all else had failed; others described complete, almost miraculous, recoveries after they had been near death.

A man named George Mahon testified: "She helped me. If it was not for her, I would be buried." A woman named Elizabeth Stewart testified that her doctor sent her home from the hospital almost two years ago to make out her will. "It won't shorten your days," she said the doctor told her, "and it won't lengthen them."
Now, after treatment by Nurse Caisse: "I'm working every day. I milk five cows, night and morning. I'm right off the farm and
have boarders and all in the house, and I have to do it all myself. I owe my life to Miss Caisse and I hope you will do something for her."

A woman named Augusta Douglas had a diagnosis by a pathologist, dated August 5, 1938: Cancer of the cervix. She was told she needed radium treatments. She told the doctor shed rather die. "With my boots on," she said. "Thank God I had enough will power. I fought the doctors and I am still."

She recalled arriving in Bracebridge for her first treatment by Rene Caisse. "I went on a bed made in the back of the car on a mattress with a feather tick folded on it, and I could stand no jolting of the car or I would get this terrible pain in my back."

She spent six weeks flat on her back in bed in Bracebridge, having treatments. "As I lay in my bed I could see the clinic on the hill and it reminded me of the Cross on the hill of Calvary. I know you men do not care anything about this but just the same it was the only ray of hope I had in the world."

Gradually she improved. She started taking walks. After eight weeks she was able to make the 220-mile round-trip drive to Bracebridge every Saturday. She testified that her doctor told her: "If that is what she has done with a few, keep on taking her treatments. They are marvelous. They are worth a million."