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Boasts Hoxsey: "I'll deposit $100,000 in any bank in Dallas County if I can't prove positively that we have cured both internal and external pathologically proven cases of cancer. Nobody's ever taken me up on the offer." Full-scale tests of his methods have been impossible for one reason: out of the thousands of patients he has treated, Hoxsey has yet to produce 50 "cures" of internal cancer with biopsies and clear five-year histories—the minimum requirements for reliable statistical study.
The worst of Hoxsey's method, say the cancer researchers, is that he draws cancer victims away from conventional treatment, making eventual cure impossible. But Hoxsey goes right on making new friends. No friend is louder or more loyal than Pennsylvania State Senator J ohn J. Haluska, who plumped for Hoxsey after his 35-year-old sister took the tonic last summer. "I don't care whether it's cough syrup or pure mountain water." she told him. "That's what I owe my life to."
Also a Cure for Recession. As administrator of the 160-bed Miners' Hospital in Spangler, Pa. (pop. 3,200), Booster Haluska castigated the hospital staff ("slaughterers") for not adopting the tonic. Then he staged a "Hoxsey Day," with a parade, baton-twirling high-school girls, and a speech by Hoxsey, up from Dallas for the occasion. Hoxsey won over miners and businessmen with talk of the wealth that a Hoxsey clinic would bring to Spangler and nearby Portage, both badly hit by the recession in the coal-mining industry. Later Haluska suggested that the Miners' Hospital (run by the United Mine Workers) should give its nurses' home as a clinic to Hoxsey.
The 16 M.D.s at Miners' Hospital promptly declared that they would quit unless 1) Hoxsey was kept out of the county, 2) Haluska was fired as administrator. Cried Haluska: "There will be bloodshed, marches on the hospital. Labor is inflamed." A few days later the doctors charged in court that Haluska, for all his baiting, had quietly offered to clear out if they paid him $10,000. Whereupon the hospital board of trustees fired both Haluska and the hospital's entire medical staff (although the doctors were reinstated later). Last week, after a stormy court hearing, County Judge John Pentz refused to help Haluska get his job back, rejected his demand for court action against the doctors and trustees. Angrily, Haluska announced that he would look for another Hoxsey clinic site near Spangler, Pa. "to serve suffering humanity."
Down in Dallas, Harry Hoxsey's golden days may be running out. Hoxsey has announced that he will continue to ship his tonic out of Texas despite the U.S. court injunction; can expect to face contempt-of-court charges. But Harry Hoxsey is undisturbed. Says he: "You couldn't run me out of here with a Gatling gun."