Charcoal Treatment

On the fringe of medical research are a number of doctors who sometimes make strange, wonderful and unexplained cures. One such is Dr. Burr Ferguson of Birmingham. Ala., who claims to cure practically every known disease by injections of diluted hydrochloric acid. In some cases he succeeds. He thinks his treatment works because the hydrochloric acid stimulates the production of white blood cells which destroy germs and help to heal wounds. Medical scholars pay no attention to him or his medication. On the other hand, many country doctors believe in Dr. Ferguson and use diluted hydrochloric acid (now widely sold in sterile ampules) and sometimes, somehow, cure their patients.

Last week a more scholarly doctor pulled just as startling a medication as hydrochloric acid out of his sick-rooms, popped it before the medical profession for all comers to examine and criticize. Dr. Denis Eugene St. Jacques, professor of history of medicine in the University of Montreal, claims to cure patients of boils, erysipelas, gonococcic infections, rheumatism, tonsillitis, peritonitis, childbed fever, pneumonia, inflammation of gallbladder, shingles--by injecting finely powdered charcoal into their veins.

A surgeon, Dr. St. Jacques, 66, picked up his ideas eight years ago. He had read in the Cornell Veterinarian how farm animals were treated by intravenous injections. Soon Dr. St. Jacques was dosing human beings, and getting a few other bold doctors (mostly in France) to do likewise. Last week he presented the claims for his treatment in an article in International Clinics, titled "Anthraco-therapy."

He asserts that he has clinical evidence establishing that pulverized charcoal mixed with water and injected into a vein of an arm:

1) Stimulates production of germ-killing white blood cells without affecting red blood cells in any way.

2) Absorbs or neutralizes toxins. Evidence: after an injection, pain immediately diminishes, inflammation and congestion subside.

3) Stimulates the linings of bloodvessels, lymph channels and certain organs to produce substances which defend a person against the disease from which he happens to suffer.

Dr. St. Jacques prefers animal charcoal because its ''particles are less angular and smoother than those of vegetable (wood) charcoal." The carbon particles he declares "disappear rapidly from the blood stream after their injection and are found lodged in the various organs: first and above all in the lungs, but also in the spleen and liver and, to a less extent, in the bone marrow and kidneys where the endothelial cells seem to absorb them. The carbon particles do not cause any local reaction. ... In short, it may be stated with assurance that this new anti-infectious agent--the intravenous injection of charcoal--is an absolutely harmless procedure which produces no local or general reactions, such as fever, chills, or headache."

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