The History of Rene Caisse
Revolutionary Nurse and Holistics Pioneer
Young Rene grew up in Bracebridge, Ontario in the early 1900s. Her mother worked for the Red Cross, while her father owned a barbershop. She was one of 10 siblings, and had a passion for medicine since she was a child, inspired by her mother. Rene wished to be independent, and left her family at 21 to study nursing at a small private hospital run by Dr. Fritz Carlton Hyde in Greenwich, Connecticut.
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In the early 1900's, modern medicine was highly undeveloped and was often a death sentence for those with cancer. Treatments such as radium, a highly radioactive element, were used - often making patients very ill and being unsuccessful in treating the disease itself.
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Once Rene had graduated from nursing school, she returned to Canada, with a mission to help humanity's suffering during that time.
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Caisse and her nursing school graduating class
Elk Lake hospital, Red Cross tents
Once returning to Canada, Rene Caisse chose to work among northern mining communities where there were no doctors at the time.
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She tended to miners and lumbermen from a 2-bed log cabin hospital in Elk Lake which she had helped develop with what was available to her and her colleagues at the time.
Later, she worked in a Red Cross tent in Cobalt, Ontario during a typhoid outbreak due to lack of sanitation.
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At 27, she advanced to Head Nurse at the Sisters of Providence Hospital in Haileybury, Ontario.
While working as a nurse in Haileybury, she met with an elderly patient whom she called Mrs. A. Her patient told her a story of when she joined her husband in a mining community in the 1890s that had no doctors or medical facilities available.
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Ten years later, while still living in the mining community, she developed a lump in her right breast that continued to swell and become painful over time. As she and her husband were far from civilization and medical treatment, Mrs. A sought treatment instead from a Canadian Ojibwa tribe, and they presented her with a herbal remedy with various herbs to help treat her condition.
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Twenty years later, Mrs. A was still alive and well, with only a scar on her right breast as a reminder of the ordeal. Rene listened intently to her story and the remedy itself, carefully remembering the details of the herbs and the administration methods.
"She did not treat the disease; she treated the person"
Referencing Caisse and her methods of treating each person individually - Bridge of Hope, James W. Demers
Shortly after hearing Mrs. A’s story, Rene’s aunt Mireza came down with an illness, diagnosed to be stomach cancer. She was given six months to live at time of diagnosis by Dr. R.N. Fisher. As she was getting her affairs in order, Rene began obtaining the ingredients that Mrs. A said were used by the Ojibwa tribe.
She prepared the mixture of herbs, and administered them to her aunt. Her aunt Mireza went on to live twenty-one more years from the date of her diagnosis. This treatment was ground-breaking and is known today as Essiac.
