Bitter Blood

by Jerry Bledsoe

  None of the other Klenner children had gone to college. All either married or went to work young. But with the older children gone from home and no young ones waiting to be fed, clothed, and educated, Frank knew that he could find the money to allow his youngest child to escape the hard labors of the steel mills and become a servant of the Church. To have a priest in the family would be high honor.

  Fred enrolled at St. Vincent’s, a Catholic college at Latrobe, and later he told of living in an attic cubbyhole with inadequate ventilation and rising at 4 every morning to work in the fields. He also came in contact with a tubercular priest, and by the end of his first school year, he, too, had the disease. He returned home, where he remained for more than a year, nursed by his mother with her prayers and home remedies. During that time, he determined that the priesthood was not for him. Instead, he told his mother, his bout with illness had caused him to realize that he wanted to become a doctor. Eventually, he returned to college, this time at St. Francis in Loretto, where he majored in chemistry, and went on to get a master’s degree. Later, he taught chemistry at Catholic University in Washington while working on a Ph.D., and on a research trip through the South, he stopped at Duke University in Durham, North Carolina, an institution endowed with the tobacco money of James Buchanan Duke, and decided that Duke was where he wanted to go to medical school. “He said it was one of the best,” his sister Marie recalled.

  At Duke, Fred met Annie Hill Sharp, setting the course for the remainder of his life. During his final year of medical school, another big flood hit Johnstown, and his sister Agnes’s husband, Daniel, was one of those who drowned in it. Fred came home to be with his family, and he was filled with talk of the long-haired, dark-eyed nurse he had met. His mother was concerned. This girl wasn’t Catholic.

  Mary Klenner’s concern paled compared to that of Annie Hill’s mother, especially after Annie Britt Sharp accidentally discovered that her daughter had converted to Catholicism. There could be only one reason for that: Annie Hill intended to marry this brooding young Catholic from the North. Annie Britt made her opposition known in her strongest terms, but no amount of argument could sway her headstrong daughter. The opposition led Fred and Annie Hill to deceit. They married in Greensboro on November 24, 1937, while Fred was working on his residency at the tuberculosis sanitarium in Winston-Salem, but they kept it from her family. Not until the following fall did they tell their secret, and then they said that they had been married just three days before, prompting the Sharps to hold a wedding dinner and to unknowingly put a false notice of their marriage in the Greensboro newspaper.

  Fred Klenner was the complete outsider when, in 1939, he finally settled in Reidsville to begin his practice: a Catholic in a town which did not yet have a Catholic church, a northerner in the South, an unwanted son-in-law of one of the town’s most prominent families. Perhaps that was the seed that caused a bunker mentality to begin to grow in him, family members later speculated.

  But in the beginning, few signs of what were later considered bizarre thoughts and deeds were publicly evident, and the medical practice of Dr. Klenner, the husband of a Sharp, grew more quickly than expected. He encouraged this growth by giving free care to policemen, firemen, ministers, and pharmacists, who helped spread the word that he was a decent fellow.

  “Fred was a darn good person,” his sister Marie said. “Nice, sociable. He was too easygoing. He’d give too much all the time. He never was greedy. If people needed something, he’d give.”

  He proved her right by never sending bills to his patients, a practice he continued throughout his career. If a patient couldn’t pay when treated then he could pay when he could. And even if he couldn’t pay and still needed a doctor, Dr. Klenner would be there, making house calls no matter the hour.

  More and more people who went to him began to think of him as a trusted friend, not as a strange outsider. The only things that blemished Dr. Klenner’s early years in Reidsville were his occasional outspoken support for the views of the Nazis of his family’s homeland and his contention that Adolf Hitler was misunderstood, which continued even after the United States went to war with Germany. This brought great embarrassment to the patriotic Sharps when they heard gossip about it. James Sharp, after all, had been a champion war bond salesman in World War I, honored by the secretary of the treasury, and he would again do his part raising money for the war effort during World War II. After several people who heard Dr. Klenner’s pro-Nazi statements challenged him, questioning his loyalty, the doctor became more circumspect.

  During the war, Fred and Annie Hill began a family. Four days after the first anniversary of the attack on Pearl Harbor, their first child, Mary Ann, was born at Duke University Hospital, where Annie Hill had gone so that one of her respected former professors could deliver her baby. Soon after Mary Ann was born, the Klenners moved into a two-story brick house on Huntsdale Drive on the southern side of Reidsville about a mile from the big Sharp home on Lindsey Street. In September 1944, a second daughter was born at Duke. She was named Gertrude for Fred’s sister who had died a teenager.

  Near the end of the war, Annie Hill went to her dentist with bleeding gums. He recommended pulling all of her teeth. When she told her husband about it, he thought the solution too drastic. He remembered reading about research using ascorbic acid—vitamin C—to cure chimpanzees with a similar problem. Why not try it? Annie Hill agreed, and after several shots, her gums stopped bleeding.

  A short time later, Dr. Klenner tried vitamin C again, this time on an obstinate man who was “near death,” as Dr. Klenner later described it, from viral pneumonia.

  “I went to his house and gave him one big shot with five grams or five thousand milligrams of vitamin C,” he told Greensboro reporter Flontina Miller years later. “When I went back later in the day, his temperature was down three degrees and he was sitting on the edge of the bed eating. I gave him another shot of C, five thousand milligrams, and kept up that dosage for three days, four times a day. And he was well. I said, ‘Well, my gosh! This is doing something.’”

  Soon afterward, when Mary Ann and Gertrude came down with measles at the same time, their father tried an experiment, first giving the girls large amounts of vitamin C, then withholding it. When he gave it to them, he later reported, the symptoms disappeared. When he withheld it they returned. After he’d satisfied himself that the vitamin really was affecting the disease, he went ahead and gave them large dosages for five straight days and the measles went away to stay.

  In May of 1946, Dr. Klenner delivered quadruplets to the thirty-six-year-old deaf-mute wife of a fifty-nine-year-old black sharecropper. The babies were tiny, three of them weighing only about two pounds each, the fourth a little more than three pounds, and in the beginning they had to be fed with medicine droppers. Dr. Klenner began giving them vitamin C immediately.

  “A premature baby specialist from Duke said they had a fifty-fifty chance to survive,” he later recalled. “I kept the humidity normal and kept giving them a lot of vitamin C, starting with five hundred milligrams a day and as they got older gradually increasing the amount.”

  The babies, all with the same first name, Mary, the only known identical quadruplets in the world, not only survived but thrived and proved a boon to their parents, Annie Mae and James Fultz. In exchange for using the girls’ pictures in ads, the Pet Milk Company bought the family a 150-acre farm from Dr. Klenner’s father-in-law, James Sharp, and built on it a modest house and a barn, complete with a mule. The quadruplets also brought Dr. Klenner his first national attention when, a year after their birth, his picture appeared in, of all places, Ebony magazine. Decades later pictures of the quadruplets still hung in Dr. Klenner’s office and home.

  These cases led Dr. Klenner to other experiments with vitamin C, and in 1948 he published his first article in a medical journal about his success in treating pneumonia with it. Dozens more such articles would appear in coming years.

  In 1949, a polio epidemic hit N
orth Carolina, and Dr. Klenner soon was diagnosing the disease in dozens of young patients, all of whom he began treating with massive amounts of vitamin C. Among them were his young niece Susie Newsom and her cousin Nancy Miller. All of his patients, he claimed, recovered completely, and later he told of pleading with doctors at the polio hospital in Greensboro to give vitamin C to all of the patients there. He even offered to pay for it. But the doctors wouldn’t listen to him, he said, and many lives were lost and many children were left crippled as a consequence.

  In her best-selling book, Let’s Eat Right to Keep Fit, published in 1954, nutritionist Adelle Davis wrote about one of Dr. Klenner’s polio patients, an unidentified eighteen-month-old girl. As Davis described the child, she was paralyzed and unconscious, her body stiff, cold, and blue. The frantic mother thought her daughter dead. But a single, massive shot of vitamin C brought the child back to life. After a second shot four hours later, Davis wrote, the child was laughing and taking a bottle, and her paralysis had disappeared.

  That wasn’t the only miracle that Davis attributed to Dr. Klenner. She told of burns he’d healed quickly with vitamin C, without pain or skin grafts, leaving no scars. She allowed him to boast of putting arthritic cripples back to work, curing even the most hopeless cases within six months.

  Not surprisingly, Adelle Davis’s book had a big effect on Dr. Klenner’s practice. Desperate people from all over the country, given little hope by their own doctors, began making their way to his clinic. His waiting room was filled every day, some of the patients carried up the steep steps in wheelchairs or on stretchers. Patients often waited hours to see the doctor. While they waited, veteran patients often entertained new ones with tales of wonder about the miraculous results Dr. Klenner had wrought with his vitamins.

  “It was not without justification that the new patient found the very air of the doctor’s waiting room permeated with hope,” one longtime patient, Bill Davis, wrote in tribute. “A very young Fred Klenner must have missed the day in school when the word ‘hopeless’ came before the class. It was not in his vocabulary.”

  “He got all the chronics,” recalled Phil Link, a Reidsville pharmacist who admired Dr. Klenner. “He got all the ones the others had given up on.”

  And to each, regardless of condition, he offered hope.

  “He really believed he could help anybody,” said another pharmacist, also a friend of Dr. Klenner.

  Dr. Klenner’s very presence seemed to inspire hope and confidence. “He had an aura about him,” a close family friend recalled.

  Everything about him spoke authority, from his firm handshake to his commanding voice and powerful blue eyes that were at once calming and reassuring.

  “You felt better when Dr. Klenner walked into the room,” one longtime patient observed. “And when he touched you, you knew everything was going to be all right.”

  “When he told you something, you believed him, and when he told you he could help you, you knew that he would,” said another patient.

  “He was the kindest, most caring and most giving man I’ve ever known,” said yet another.

  Many patients observed that once they were in the presence of Dr. Klenner he had a way of making them feel as if they were his only concern. His wife, too, shared some of these qualities. In the years when their children were growing up, she worked with her husband only occasionally, but in later years, she became his full-time nurse.

  “When you were around them, you became very, very secure about whatever illness you had,” a patient and family friend said. “You also became dependent on them. It became almost like a love affair.”

  Dr. Klenner’s patients became dependent for one simple reason: they were convinced that he was making them well. “He helped just about everybody he treated,” said his friend Phil Link. “If he hadn’t helped them, they wouldn’t’ve come back.”

  Most of them came back. And kept coming. They not only trusted Dr. Klenner, they adored him with utter devotion.

  “To belittle Dr. Klenner to his patients is like slandering motherhood or the American flag to the Daughters of the American Revolution,” Bill Davis wrote in his tribute. “His patients vie avidly to outdo each other in praising him.”

  “Dr. Klenner didn’t have patients,” observed a family acquaintance. “He had acolytes.”

  “His patients thought he was right next to Christ,” said Phil Link. “They worshiped him. They thought there was nobody like Dr. Klenner.”

  If, to some, Dr. Klenner’s patients seemed almost religiously dedicated, and if his shabby clinic seemed to become almost a shrine where the faithful brought their pain-racked bodies for the miracle of the master’s healing touch, it was not surprising, for a religious fervor indeed existed between Dr. Klenner and his patients.

  He quoted the Bible to them. He prayed for them and assured them that he would continue to do so. He gave them prayer cards that promised protection from evil forces. He even anointed some with what he said were sacred waters from Our Lady of Lourdes, the Catholic shrine in France where millions of the lame and desperately ill seek miraculous cures. In a way, his clinic was a miniature American version of Lourdes, with vitamins replacing the sacred waters.

  As Dr. Klenner’s experiments expanded, his fame grew. He was frequently written about in magazines and books, hailed by some as a genius, a medical pioneer. Irving Stone wrote about Dr. Klenner’s work in his book The Healing Factor: Vitamin C Against Disease, as did the Nobel Prize-winning chemist Linus Pauling in his 1970 best-seller, Vitamin C and the Common Cold. Dr. Klenner told family members that Linus Pauling had used his work extensively but only mentioned him briefly. He didn’t seem upset about it, though. “If he wants the big name for it, let him have it,” Dr. Klenner’s sister Agnes remembered him saying. “He doesn’t know much about it anyway.”

  Dr. Klenner still depended on conventional treatments, but his practice grew more unconventional with the years. Some patients left with nothing more than a prayer and an old-time home remedy, something for which his mother’s faith had instilled lasting belief in Dr. Klenner. But more and more, he came to depend on vitamin C as a cure-all.

  “Ascorbic acid is the safest and most valuable substance available to the physician,” he wrote in one of his medical journal articles. “Many headaches and many heartaches will be avoided with its proper use.”

  He used it against all the viral and bacterial diseases, for bursitis, arthritis, poisoning, spider bites, and a host of other ailments. He began touting its use in treating cancer, saying that fifty grams a day administered intravenously would control the disease. “Who can say what one hundred grams or three hundred grams given intravenously daily for several months might accomplish in cancer!” he told a magazine interviewer. “The potential is so great and the employment so elementary that only the illiterate will continue to deny its use.”

  “If you went to Dr. Klenner with an ingrown toenail, he’d give you a shot of vitamin C,” the local sheriff, Bobby Vernon, later noted.

  In 1978, Dr. Klenner was rewarded for his work and long-held faith in vitamin C. On March 18, on the fiftieth anniversary of the discovery of vitamin C by Hungarian researcher Albert Szent-Györgyi, who received the Nobel prize for physiology, Dr. Klenner was presented a gold plaque at a special symposium of the World Congress of Health. The plaque bore the likenesses of four men: Albert Szent-Györgyi, Linus Pauling, Irving Stone, and Fred Klenner. Dr. Klenner considered it his proudest honor. “On a gold medal with two Nobel Prize winners! And Irving Stone!” he told Bill Davis with glee. “You can’t get much higher than that.”

  That wasn’t enough to satisfy some of his patients, though. “In my estimation, his work—works, I should say—were worthy of the Nobel Prize in several fields,” said Virginia Wiley, a patient for more than thirty years.

  But to his colleagues in Reidsville, the recognition and awards meant little. Just as Dr. Klenner had been an outsider in Reidsville and his wife’s family, he also had bec
ome an outsider in his profession. Other doctors distanced themselves from him and his unorthodox treatments, especially after he began using large dosages of other vitamins to treat other ailments. They were skeptical of his claims, noting that they were based on clinical observations, not controlled experiments, that Dr. Klenner kept no records of his treatments and results. They thought that he held out false hope to those who had none and that his treatments were not only largely ineffectual but perhaps dangerous. They noted that few studies had been done to show the effects of massive amounts of vitamins on the body, particularly over long periods. They pointed out that some vitamins, such as A and D, which Dr. Klenner was using, were known to accumulate in the body in toxic quantities.

  “Ridiculous,” Dr. Klenner responded to charges that vitamin treatment could be dangerous. “Vitamins are innocuous substances. After it all breaks down, what you don’t need, the body kicks out.”

  “He knew other doctors laughed at him,” said a family friend, “but he also knew what he was doing would save lives.”

  “Let’s face it,” said his friend Phil Link, “people called Dr. Klenner a quack. Used to make me damned mad. He was as dedicated and sincere as he could be. All he gave a damn about was his patients and his family.”

  What some doctors suspected was that Dr. Klenner frequently diagnosed diseases that people didn’t have. That made curing them with vitamins easy. It became more evident that this was indeed the case after Dr. Klenner became a firm believer that massive amounts of B vitamins would cure multiple sclerosis, something that other doctors and the National Multiple Sclerosis Society denied. But as word spread about his treatment, more and more multiple sclerosis patients, many of them already crippled and given no hope anywhere else, began coming to Dr. Klenner, some of them moving temporarily to Reidsville from other states so that they could undergo long-term treatment. Dr. Klenner also began diagnosing more cases of multiple sclerosis. Many of these never had the disease, other doctors later discovered.