Dr. ARTURO BRELL:

Dr. Arturo Brell was born in 1904, in Upper Bavaria; he studied Natural Science in Munich. However, the young Brell dreamt of the exotic Americas of the Aztecs and Incas. It was not until 1926 that the chance meeting turned his dreams into reality. A cleric called Schaffer, then leader and parish priest of a group of German colonists in Pozuzo, suggested he make the trip to Peru to set up a school with the aim of educating the region’s natives in the way of the Western World.

Three years after his arrival, Brell had become a prosperous coffee grower in Chanchamayo. It was there, living side by side with the Campa and Amuesha Indians, that he was able to become familiar with the area’s tribal customs. Among many other things, he noted that the locals, despite living among the constant smoke of cooking fires and broiling most of their food over charcoal, both factors exposing them to a daily absorption of the carcinogenic elements found in tar, were untroubled by cancer. Years of painstaking research led him to the conclusion that this state of affairs had to do fundamentally with a powerful immunological system. Brell himself, having already obtained Uncaria extracts, had eliminated his long-standing rheumatic complaints, and noticed that his complexion had improved and his hair had grown rapidly.

The day of reckoning came when another colonist, his friend Schuler, finding himself helpless against a terminal lung cancer, went to him for help. To the incredulity and amazement of the doctors who had been treating him, after a couple of years of dosing him with preparations made from the miraculous plant, the sick man made a full recovery. Until the day he died (from other causes) at eighty-eight years of age, the old man went on working, in the company of his children, in his tropical sawmill in Villa Rica and, according to those who knew him, even occasionally smoking a cigarette made from his own tobacco. In August 1974, Schuler wrote a letter of gratitude to Arturo Brell, saying: "If it hadn’t been for your treatment and herb extracts I wouldn’t be alive today, four years after being diagnosed with terminal illness by the doctors".