Click here for our latest addition - August 11, 2019 -  the 131st anniversary of Rene Caisse's birth  - a 12-part newspaper series by Ted Britton from Bracebridge ON, Rene Caisse's home town!

Welcome to the Virtual Rene M. Caisse Room, an ever-expanding collection of archival material curated electronically.

This project was inspired by my October 2012 tour of Bracebridge, Ontario, Rene Caisse's home town, and a subsequent visit in 2015. There used to be a real Rene Caisse Room but it has been boarded up for several years now and the exhibits appear to have disappeared.  They are supposed to be on display at the Rene M. Caisse Memorial Theatre but it was closed when I was there, and there is virtually no reference to its namesake anywhere I can find, not even on their website.  I don't know if they have any physical exhibits either, though they were at one time reported to have "most of the artifacts." Update June 22, 2015:  I just got back from a second visit to Bracebridge, and indeed there is a display at the Theatre….. But now I am trying to find out what happened to "most of the artifacts"…!

Here is what the original Rene M. Caisse Memorial Room, opened in 1995 by the Bracebridge Historical Society looked like inside:

The Real Rene Caisse Room - Bracebridge Ontario 1997 from Debbie Jakovac on Vimeo.

And this is what is on display now: 

Read the June 2015 Canadian Adventure blogs for more on this ...

The online Rene Caisse Room will soon have some new "exhibits!"

Images of the Rene Caisse archival material currently available for viewing only by actually going to the Bracebridge Public Library and the Bracebridge Town vaults in person will soon begin populating this online archival tribute to Rene Caisse and Essiac.

The legacy of Rene Caisse and this tea is still very much alive in Ontario, and Bracebridge, Rene's home--although not in a very 'permanent' way.   There is her statue, the display at the Theatre named after her, and there is a street named after her and a plaque on the door of her former clinic.

But on closer scrutiny, people still have relatives that were patients of Rene's, or they learned how to make the tea from Mary McPherson, or had some other direct memory or knowledge of Essiac. Everyone or at least the older folks in Bracebridge know about Essiac, and that you pronounce it Rene Caisse (REEN CASE) and Essiac (ESS-EE-ACK). And lots of people know how to make the tea the right way, and are doing it quietly.

It would be so cool to make Rene's old Clinic into her museum, but it is a big dream. Maybe instead, in this small localized way, the memories will live on and the knowledge won't be lost..much like little colonies of Sheep sorrel always keep it going no matter what.

The original 1977 Homemaker's Magazine article

Journalism in the 1970s was so free and open!! This article is like a fresh breath of what free speech used to mean in journalism.  Not surprising that it caused such a sensation in Canada and elsewhere! An original copy of this magazine, which went out of print in 2011, was used to create an exact, complete copy of the original piece.   Thanks to Mali Klein for her donation of original issues of the June and July 1077 Homemakers magazine to the Rene Caisse US Archive collection!  Click here to buy a printed version of Could Essiac Halt Cancer? (June 1977, by Shiela Snow and Carol Allen.

ESSIAC VIDEOS - click here!

A brief timeline of the history of Rene Caisse and Essiac. This was compiled as part of the making of the movie Essiac A Modern Folk Remedy (DVD is now out of print, but the video is available for online viewing here).

Photocopy of the original affidavit filed by Mary McPherson,

formally entering the 4-herb Essiac formula into the public domain.

A Dangerous Sweetness: Love and War, by Mali Klein