He took on the responsibility to administer just this alone without the addition of other more conventional means. He believed that unknowingly they had been preventing and treating cancer for centuries.Īs he began to experiment with Chaga he considered should it be be boiled and at what temperature, how many doses should be given and which tumour’s responded etc.Īnd so he began to treat his patients with the Chaga mushroom.

He discovered that the peasants would save money on buying tea, instead cutting down and brewing up the birch mushroom. This lead him to study this phenomena further. Maslennikov, was a Russian doctor born in June 1887, and remembered by his friends and patients as being a kind and gentle man.ĭuring this particular period in history medical literature was increasingly writing about cancer, but Maslennikov noted that he didn’t have any cancer patients among the peasants that he treated. ~Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, Cancer Ward (1968) Chaga, The Peasant’s Tea “He could not imagine any greater joy than to go away into the woods for months on end, to break off this chaga, crumble it, boil it up on a campfire, drink it and get well like an animal.” Assigned to a clinic to receive high dose radiation, he tells his fellow patients that he wishes he could have been given a more simple “peasant’s” cure.

In the chapter entitled “The Cancer in the Birch Tree” Solzhenitsyn describes the character Oleg Kostoglotov, a political prisoner, having been released from a prison camp only to find he has developed cancer. Very few westerners had even heard of this strange looking mushroom until Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn introduced us to it in his 1968 semi-autobiographical novel, The Cancer Ward. It is a parasitic fungus.īlack, lumpy and charred-like, Chaga is found growing on the trunk of the birch tree in forests of northern Europe, Asia and North America. The Chaga mushroom (Inonotus obliquus) doesn’t look like a regular mushroom.

Alexander solzhenitsyn cancer ward