Milbank Johnson

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

This article or section does not cite its references or sources.
Please help improve this article by introducing appropriate citations. (help, get involved!) This article has been tagged since November 2006.

Milbank Johnson, MD, was born on October 13, 1871. He went to college at the University of Southern California, and received his MD certification from Northwestern School of Medicine in 1893. He founded the first hospital in Alhambra, California, but closed it two years later when he moved to Los Angeles. He was the Chief Surgeon for what became the Southern California Edison Company, as well as a director of the Pacific Mutual Life Insurance Company, which had moved to the Los Angeles area following the devastating San Francisco earthquake in 1906. He was also a Professor of Physiology at the University of Southern California in the early 1900s.

Johnson was one of the authors of the revised City Charter for the City of Los Angeles in 1915, and was very active in many associations and organizations. He served as a director of the Pasadena General Hospital, president of the Southwestern Museum, and chairman of the California Taxpayer's Association.

In the early 1930s Johnson became interested in the "Universal Microscope", and later the "Rife Ray" machine, invented by Royal Rife of San Diego. Studies done at Northwestern Medical School by Edward Rosenow, MD, were published showing the effectiveness of the Rife Microscope over conventional light microscopes. Later, a culture medium invented by Arthur I. Kendall, Ph.D. of Northwestern Medical School (and a dean of the school years earlier) was found to be effective for culturing cancer cells for microscopic study. In 1933 Johnson became interested in the success of the Rife Ray machine, a radio transmitter driving a plasma lamp device, in disabling or killing a number of bacterial organisms, as well as what appeared to be a form of cancer cell. Johnson's first wife had died of cancer in 1920, and in 1934, two years before his retirement, and using on the "Rife Ray" machines, he set up and ran what has become known as the "1934 Cancer Clinic" at a Scripps facility in La Jolla, California, near San Diego.

Johnson wrote, in 1935, that the results of the 1934 Clinic were "not conclusive", and indeed, one of the patients from that clinic came to Johnson in early 1935 with an advanced cancer in or behind an eye, and Johnson sent him off to have the cancer and eye removed. Johnson was an avid writer, and kept copies of all his letters, although letters from the period just before the 1934 Clinic though early 1935 are not to be found. Records of the patients of that clinic or their conditions have also never been released. Various claims about the results of the clinic have never been substantiated, regardless of the many articles and books about it.

Johnson set up, with the approval of USC President Dr. Rufus B. von Kleinsmid, what was called the Special Medical Research Committee in 1935 to look into the Rife Ray machine, and it is thought that this committee was a gentleman's agreement between Johnson and USC, possibly for liability protection.

Johnson held two more clinics, the first in Los Angeles in 1935 focusing on various diseases, and the last in 1936-37 in Altadena, California, at the Scripps Home for the Aged. This clinic focused on treatment for cataracts, and Johnson wrote that the results were excellent, with total restoration of vision in twenty-nine out of thirty patients. Johnson quarreled with Rife in 1938 (Johnson had gotten USC to offer Rife an honorary doctorate in 1935 or 1936, which Rife refused to have anything to do with) and by 1938 dropped his interest in Rife, although he stayed very active in the National and the California Taxpayer's Associations.

Johnson died of a heart attack in 1944. His second wife, Isobel Simeral, died in 1948.