Harry M. Hoxsey

individual · Taylorville, Illinois (first clinic, 1924) and Dallas, Texas, USA (Hoxsey Cancer Clinic, 1936-1960); the clinic's formula continues to be sold at the Bio-Medical Center, Tijuana, Mexico, opened in 1963 by a former Hoxsey nurse

lived:1901–1974

active:1924–1974

type:individual

role:promoter

location:Taylorville, Illinois (first clinic, 1924) and Dallas, Texas, USA (Hoxsey Cancer Clinic, 1936-1960); the clinic's formula continues to be sold at the Bio-Medical Center, Tijuana, Mexico, opened in 1963 by a former Hoxsey nurse

eventual status:publicly_disconfirmed

FINANCIAL CONFLICTS

Hoxsey held no medical license and was repeatedly convicted of practicing medicine without one, which did not stop him from operating clinics in as many as seventeen states by the mid-1950s (Texas State Historical Association) out of a base at the Dallas clinic, one of the largest privately owned cancer centers in the world at the time. He personally owned and operated the clinics that collected patients' treatment fees; the University of Texas Center for Alternative Medicine Research in Cancer's 1999 patient-information summary recorded a flat charge of $3,500 for a lifetime supply of tonic, visits, medications, and doctor fees, with laboratory, x-ray, and travel costs on top of that. No source reviewed quantifies his total personal income from the clinics.

INTERVENTIONS PROMOTED

Hoxsey herbal tonic and escharotic paste

NOTES

Harry M. Hoxsey was born near Auburn, Illinois, on 23 October 1901, one of twelve children of a livery-stable owner and veterinary surgeon. He left school at fifteen to work as a coal miner and later completed high school by correspondence. He had no medical training of any kind. Hoxsey inherited a family formula for treating cancer, an internal herbal tonic and an external caustic paste, that he said his great-grandfather had developed after a horse’s leg tumor reportedly cleared up when the animal grazed on a particular mix of wild plants, and that was passed down through his father to him. He opened his first cancer clinic in Taylorville, Illinois in 1924 and, after years of moving between states to stay ahead of medical-licensing prosecutions, opened a clinic in Dallas, Texas in 1936 that grew into one of the largest privately owned cancer treatment centers in the world, with affiliated clinics in as many as seventeen states by the mid-1950s. He sued the American Medical Association’s editor, Morris Fishbein, for libel after Fishbein’s publications called him a fraud, and won only nominal damages. The U.S. Food and Drug Administration banned interstate sale of the Hoxsey treatment in 1956 and, after further litigation, forced the closure of his American clinics by 1960. Hoxsey developed prostate cancer in 1967, did not respond to his own tonic, and underwent conventional surgery; he died in Dallas in late December 1974. A former nurse at his Dallas clinic, Mildred Nelson, opened the Bio-Medical Center in Tijuana, Mexico in 1963, where the same tonic and paste are still sold today.