A Peppery Don Beats the Big C
By Harriet Sergeant

Twenty five years ago, five young men and I lay nervously on a double bed. We were all students and this was our first night at Oxford University. The bed belonged to Michael Gearing-Tosh, our new tutor, described by one former pupil as resembling a vulture with in-growing toenails.

Oxford dons were notoriously cranky and indifferent to their students. We did not know what to expect. Certainly not an elaborate dinner cooked by Michael on a camping stove, offers of wine and the arrival of John Bayley and Irish Murdoch as fellow guests.

After dinner, Michael acted out the play he was writing with such gusto that he pulled down his curtains. As we left, he handed me a 2ft high red pepper pot. "Hit any young man you think needs it," was my tutor's advice.

So when Michael got cancer at the aged of 54, and was given only months to live, I was not surprised that he attacked it with the same eccentric, delightful and generous spirit that he had shown us that evening.

Eight years later, his book Living Proof is an account of his fight against myeloma, a cancer of the bone marrow, and of his survival.

It is a most unusual book. It does not preach or tell you what to do. It rejects medicine but honours doctors. It is about friendship, but these are the sort of friends who are bossy, funny and often at odds with one another. Most of all it is about making a decision in a state of terror. It is an attempt to get at the truth and to live with truth's uncertainty.

Cancer doctors, Michael quickly discovered, do not go in for truth, but the principle of 'gradual disclosure'. Or, as one remarked: "Keep the patients calm. Do not tell them much. Try love and a tranquilliser."

They guard the essential truth that they 'know so little how the body works', as one specialist put it - let along the effects of chemotherapy on the body. "Touch it," another warned Michael through a friend, "and he's a goner."

Michael rejected urgings to start chemotherapy immediately. He took advice then ignored it.

He dithered for months before finally settling on a sever regime of four coffee enemas a day (through which he read War and Peace), a strict diet, vegetable juices, vitamin and mineral supplements and breathing exercises. He never comes off his diet. At the college dinner, while the rest of us sipped champagne, Michael wandered about with a bowl of lentil soup.

As much as about truth, this book is about fear. Cancer is the illness on which we project our fears of death.

A book is the nearest many of us get to examining those fears. As Michael puts it: "If you are diagnosed with cancer, you need time to think." Fear makes us like 'dependent children' eager to entrust ourselves to doctors and conventional medicine. Living Proof points out a different if no less difficult route.

The joy of this book is the vivid writing and Michael's sense of fun, which never deserts him. His arguments with Rachel Trickett, the former principal of St Hug's College and the woman with whom he lived for 25 year, are delicious.

"The Slav soul," she announces on hearing of the arrival of Michael's new friend, a Russian captain, "is always a disaster."

His breathing exercises where he visualises killing off cancer cells are as exciting as a James Bond movie.

His arguments are presented in dramatic fashion. In his head, he forces cancer specialists to take the stand and present their case. "All are male and in white coats, except the GP, who wears a suit, with a too youthful tie. Nobody is to leave until I finish my post mortem."

The men in white coats are almost as much the enemy as the cancer cells. As a tutor, Michael always wanted us to get at the truth. He would not put up with evasion or flim-flam.

Living Proof is what one astute man makes of the medical establishment. He does not make much. He scrutinises their writings with the same terrifying vigour that he applied to my weekly essays.

If I was lucky, tiny ticks of Michael's approval leapt like fleas about the page. Did that medical journal, The Lancet, expect its editorials to be analysed with the same care as Michael applied to Paradise Lost or Hamlet?

Queen Elizabeth I, Donne, Chekhov and Primo Levi are treated like old friends and pulled into the witness box along with Michael's cast of unusual admirers, a fabulous American heiress, a Russian captain, a Malaysian tycoon, impoverished students and strong willed women.

In the end, the title speaks for itself. Michael is still alive.

What this proves, I am not sure. That coffee enemas and carrot juice work? Or that a man of large spirit and unusual intelligence who refused to be dehumanised by a disease or its specialists, has found his way to live?

What chance, after all, has death, or the rude doctor, got against a weapon like that red pepper pot? You must judge for yourself.
Critics Choice - Daily Mail, Friday 15th February 2002

CTM Comment: Michael Gearing-Tosh is to be applauded for his stentorian stance against chemotherapy, and his common-sense embracing of treatments he knew by instinct were going to do him good. His story is a fabulous endorsement of the desire to live, even when faced with insurmountable odds. For further information on natural, nutritional, non-toxic treatments for cancer, obtain a copy of Phillip Day's excellent book Cancer: Why We're Still Dying to Know the Truth, available at www.credence.org.