Oxygen Therapies have been used for more than 100 years, and have been used commonly for more than 80 years. We know this because a wealth of references and the old books that have been around can still be sought out. As a therapy, during the early 1900s ozone began to flourish here in America, but like many other successful natural remedies of the time it was discredited here by its chemical competitors, so ozone flourished in Germany where it was accorded wider acceptance.

When ozone gas was used for the first time in 1856 as a means of disinfecting operating rooms, it made its mark in medical history. Four years later, in 1860, ozonated water was put into use with the building of a municipal ozone water purification plant in the principality of Monaco, France. We now meet an interesting phase in history where the medical application of ozone begins to surface.

The Medical Pioneers in Ozone History

Dr. Day - In 1878, Australia, Dr. Day wrote the first edition of papers on Ozone Treatment and Scarlatina and Smallpox.

Charles J. Kenworthy MD - In 1885, the Florida Medical Association published Ozone by Charles J. Kenworthy M.R.S.V a doctor from Jacksonville, Florida who used ozone in his medical practice. Think about it, by 1885, this doctor was actually using ozone as medicine in America!

Dr. Charles O. Linder - In 1902, Dr. Linder was featured in Centennial Magazine for injecting ozone and using state of the art ozone equipment in his Spokane, Washington clinic.

[Linder and Kenworthy's and Tesla's use of ozone proves ozone was in regular usage in the U.S. before 1885, and predating the 1906 Pure Food and Drug Act, its subsequent revisions, and the FDA as well. Therefore ozone's medical usage should be grandfathered in the U.S.]

Institute for Oxygen Therapy Healing - In 1898 the institute was started in Berlin by Thauerkauf & Luth, and the originator and founder of naturopathy Dr. Benedict Lust was practicing in New York.

Erwin Payr (1876-1946) - Payr learned of ozone, sitting as a patient in Fisch's dental chair. He immediately saw great possibilities for ozone in medicine. Payr and French physician Paul Aubourg were the first medical doctors to use ozone in rectal insufflation to treat mucous, colitis, and fistulae. He presented his 290-page publication, On Treatment with Ozone in Surgery at the 59th Congress of the German Surgical Society, in Berlin, 1935. In 1945, Payr's interest in ozone led him to inject ozone intravenously.

E. A. Fisch (1899-1966) - This dental physician and surgeon is credited with using ozone as a disinfectant in his dental work and called it 'Ozone Therapy.' Fisch had a wide range of experience with ozone and this was recorded in a large number of publications including Italian, French and German.

Joachim Haensler (1908-1981) - Working together with Hans Wolff, he took up medical work with ozone and designed a generator named the 'Ozonosan.' The large Haensler Ozone Company got its start here.

Hans Wolff (1924-1980) - After being a WWII American prisoner of war, Wolff started his ozone based medical practice in 1953 and devoted the rest of his life to it. In 1972, with Joachim Haensler, he formed the German Medical Ozone Society [Since 1993 renamed the Medical Society for Ozone Application in Prevention and Therapy]. He wrote the book Medical Ozone [Das medizinische Ozon] in 1979.

Ozone Begins to Take Off

In 1900, Tesla was using and teaching others to use ozone medically in the U.S. He was the first to use high voltage, high frequency, low amperage AC to make ozone. He was granted many ozone patents.

In Germany, Werner Von Siemens constructed a waterworks using ozone in Wiesbaden in 1901. This was followed one year later by another waterworks in the Westphalian city of Paderborn. In due course, Germany was to become one of the most prolific countries in the research and application of ozone.

In the 1900s, J.H. Clarke's London Dictionary of Practical Materia Medica described the successful use of 'Oxygenium' (ozone charged water) in treating anemia, cough, cancer, diabetes, influenza, morphine poisoning, canker sores, strychnine poisoning, and whooping-cough.

Recognizing its medicinal value, the Berlin physician Albert Wolff, first used ozone in 1915 to treat skin diseases. Ozone became available for the German army during World War I, and was used extensively to treat infected battle wounds and anaerobic infections.

Erwin Payr now involved greatly with ozone publishes Ozone Treatment in Surgery and presents it to the German Surgical Society in 1935. At the same time Paul Aubourg established the use of ozone enemas or rectal insufflation in the Paris Hospitals.

Not to be outdone, America was now selling all sorts of big cabinet type medical ozone generators to practitioners all over the U.S. It was rapidly becoming big business, the 'talk of the town' and slowly becoming the 'in' thing to have. [Note: American naturopaths have used ozone continually since the 1800's.]

By the time of the Second World War, Germany was filled with ozone institutes. Everybody was using it. However, as I explained earlier, the allied bombers then came along and blew up all the German ozone institutes, leaving only one building left standing, the IG Farben drug works. What a coincidence!

The IG Farben drug works company was the largest chemical manufacturing enterprise in the world on the eve of WWII wielding extraordinary political and economical power. Its representatives sit on the controlling boards of every pharmaceutical house of the world at this moment in time.

Due to the persecution by the drug trusts (pharmaceutical companies) at home, and the European destruction that the wars caused, ozone therefore disappeared from the public [medical doctor] scene around the 1940s. The Germans still continued to use it, but the world in general no longer had such extensive access to this therapy.

Although the spread of German ozone institutes and the practice of Ozone Therapy was interrupted, medical ozone began to re-surface in other ways. During the Second World War the FBI would go to Brazil, seize Nazis and bring them to Ellis Island. As I already mentioned, Dr. Robert Mayer was a physician at the Ellis Island, New York prisoner of war camp. On becoming sick, one of the prisoners, a German engineer and chemist, went to Dr. Mayer and said, "Doc, I'm sick. Give me some ozone." Mayer declared, "Ozone, what's ozone?" That was the start of this German chemist teaching Dr. Mayer all about its medicinal value.

Because it worked better than anything else, Dr. Mayer continued to use ozone He specialized as a pediatrician using ozone for over 50 years on more than 14,000 children in his career before coming out of retirement to treat AIDS patients. That's when I met him. Before his retirement, he was working at Miami's Jackson Memorial Hospital and giving ozone to all the children as he made his daily rounds. After many years of this, the powers that be finally came by, and said, "Dr. Mayer please stop giving ozone to the children." He asked, "Why? It doesn't hurt them." The reply came, "I know, but nobody else is doing it, so you have to stop." Despite Dr. Mayer's success and by now expertise with ozone, he was thereafter prevented from giving ozone to sick children and curing them. Many Germans have retired to the U.S. and brought their knowledge of ozone with them, but Dr. Mayer was one of the few historical U.S. ozone doctors.

Ozone's safety when properly administered is proven. Remember the 1980 study by the German Medical Society for Ozone Therapy showed that out of all the millions of dosages given, the side effect rate was so low that only 32 of 5.5 million people had slight problems? The cleansing side effects of a few days of Ozone Therapy are sometimes; runny nose, a fever, diarrhea, some swelling, or some nausea, but always something that goes away in a couple of days. There's no permanent harm from the correct application of the proper protocols given at the right dosages.

Ozone was once limited until the advent of plastics in the 1950's because ozone gas attacks dead organic rubber hoses. It will eat up rubber surgical gloves and rubber bands, and that limited its usage in the old days. Today, the use of ozone resistant plastic components such as silicone or norprene in delivery hoses makes ozone easier to handle.

During the unfamiliarity days of ozone in the U.S., in 1958 Haensler introduced the first successful commercial ozone generator that produced specific therapeutic level ozone concentrations while using plastics in the design. In The Use of Ozone in Medicine, Renate Viebahn-Haensler stated "Haensler and Wolff paved the way for Ozone Therapy as we know it today." She further wrote "Constantly basing his research on the considerable number of publications by Payr and Aubourg, it was H. Wolff who subsequently introduced extracorporeal blood treatment [autohemotherapy] into medical practice; Werkmeister developed local treatment methods in the form of 'sub atmospheric ozone gas application', and Rokitansky-as a surgeon-presented the first comprehensive studies on the topical and systemic treatment of diabetic gangrene. Knoch then introduced rectal ozone insufflation into proctology, once more confirming its value in a controlled proctitis study."