The doctor, the patients and the treatment given at the Clinique Générale la Prairie, overlooking Switzerland's Lake Geneva near Montreux, are all remarkable. The physician is Dr. Paul Niehans, '77 (though he looks more like 60), who declares: "I reject nine out of ten would-be patients. I choose persons who represent a certain value to the world by their individual prominence." Among the chosen have been the late Pope Pius XII and the Imam of Yemen (treated in Rome), the late King Ibn Saud, Painter Georges Braque, Somerset Maugham, Gloria Swanson, the King of Morocco. Most of them received Dr. Niehans' rejuvenation treatment—one or more injections of cells from an unborn lamb.
Whether this constitutes medical magic by a man ahead of his time or dangerous charlatanry is hotly debated. But that it has won fame and fortune for Dr. Niehans there is no doubt. Born in Bern, son of a professor of orthodox medicine, Niehans studied for the Protestant ministry before turning to medicine. He practiced conventional surgery and endocrinology until the late 19205. Then he got interested in transplanting organs from animals to humans. (By no coincidence, this was at the height of the late Serge Voronoff's vogue as a transplanter of monkey testicles.) In 1931 Dr. Niehans had a woman patient whom he rated too ill for a gland transplant. He gave her instead an injection of cells from the ground-up parathyroids of a newborn lamb. Last week, a sprightly 75, she wrote Dr. Niehans from Bern to say that she "never felt better."
Fresh v. Powdered. Dr. Niehans experimented (often on himself) with cell extracts from various organs and glands of several young animals, eventually hit on the unborn Iamb (from a ewe slaughtered just before it is due to deliver) as the best source for most purposes. To ensure a steady supply of fresh, uncontaminated material, he has a veterinarian choose the animals and supervise slaughtering. Of his $120 minimum fee for a single injection, most goes for the raw material, he says, leaving him $30. For aged or debilitated patients, and for doctors elsewhere who want to use the method, Rhein-Chemie in Heidelberg packages dried cells (average cost: $5-$10 a vial). "It's like the difference between fresh milk and powdered milk," explains Dr. Niehans.
It matters little what a patient is suffering from. Dr. Niehans claims cures of dwarfism in children, underdeveloped genitals or breasts, obesity, mongolism, some forms of mental retardation, absence of menstruation, homosexuality, habitual abortion, low (but not high) blood pressure, cirrhosis of the liver, reduced sexual desire, impotence, arteriosclerosis, and some forms of heart disease. Diagnosis and treatment are decided on the basis of a still controversial urinalysis, in which the proportions of certain "ferments" are supposed to show which glands or organs are out of whack.
Dr. Niehans bars the use of cellular injections in patients with infections. Furthermore, he insists, patients get no X rays, diathermy, vaccinations, liquor or tobacco. He makes no claim to have cured cancer, but insists that among the thousands of patients to whom he personally has given 20,000 injections, none have later developed cancer.