Harry Hoxsey Cancer Cure

The cancer treatment practiced by Harry M. Hoxsey (1901-1974) is one of the longest-lived unconventional therapies of this century. It has retained great popular appeal, despite unrelenting opposition by the medical profession; despite 40 years of biting journalistic ridicule by such skilled AMA journalists as Arthur Cramp and Morris Fishbein; despite an unceasing stream of court actions; even despite an unprecedented "Public Warning Against Hoxsey Cancer Treatment" which the Commissioner of the FDA ordered mounted in 46,000 US post offices and substations in 1956 (Young, 1967, 387; Larrick, 1956). Since Hoxsey's death, his treatment has continued under his longtime nurse assistant, Mildred Nelson, [RN,] who currently oversees the thriving Bio-Medical Center at Tijuana, within sight of the border between Mexico and the United States. The most controversial aspect of Hoxsey's method, in the eyes of orthodox medicine, was the dark brown liquid which he used to treat internal cancer. For many years Hoxsey refused to divulge the formula for this substance, generating a frenzy of vituperation in the pages of JAMA over a period of decades. He later gave several differing accounts of its origin (Young, 1967, 362). According to his autobiography (Hoxsey, 1956, 62-64), it was his great-grandfather, a horse breeder named John Hoxsey, who developed it at mid-nineteenth century, out of grasses and flowering wild plants which John took from the pasture where a favorite stallion, afflicted with a cancerous growth, grazed daily until the growth necrotized.