Jack Yon

On one of the mountains northeast of Escondido lives a kindly old man who has spent his life searching for the secret of eternal youth. In the course of his seventy-four years, he has circled the world seven times and visited fifty-two countries, including some of the least accessible places, those inhabited by the earth’s most long-lived people. He has published twenty-seven books, with six more ready for the press. But his proudest accomplishment is this: he has peered into a third of a million pairs of eyes, and there, in the depths of those 700,000 irises, he believes he has come closest to achieving his quest.

Bernard Jensen

Jack Yon

Bernard Jensen doesn’t care so much whether any given eye is blue or green or brown. He says there are still advocates of a theory to the effect that blue-eyed people are healthier. And Jensen furthermore has observed that as people improve their living habits, their eyes lighten in color. But he says he has failed over the years to correlate principal eye color with strength of constitution; today he suspects that that theory has racist origins.

Jack Yon

Instead, when he shines a light into someone’s face .Jensen scrutinizes the delicate, three-dimensional web of fibers which make up the section surrounding the black pupil. He notes the patterns woven into those fibers, the shadows and highlights. “The tongue is different in everyone, the fingerprint is different, and the eyes are different,” he declares. He thinks someday police will identify criminals by the unique structures in their irises. And Jensen is certain that today he can identify health problems by studying a person’s eyes.

Jack Yon

This art (or science, Jensen insists) is called iridology, and the Escondido resident is probably the world’s foremost master of it. Certainly he has worked at it longer than any other living practitioner — some fifty-three years. Jensen wrote one of the bibles of the discipline, and he founded Iridologists International, an association which he says now includes 1800 members throughout the world. I spoke with him out on his twenty-six acre mountain retreat, inside a green, Chinese-style building decorated with round windows, red trim, and a sign which announces it to be the “House of the Seventh Happiness.”

Jensen with followers

Jack Yon

Jensen isn’t tall, but somehow he seems to be a big man, wide of girth and straight of posture. He favors baggy suits and string ties, held in place with big silver-and-turquoise clips. The hair on his temples is snowy white, blending back into a luxuriant steel gray. He has a big nose and big ears, and his face appears remarkably wrinkle-free, except for two circles etched beneath his eyes. His own irises are light cobalt.

Jack Yon

In his office, he has pinned up an enlarged photograph of those eyes and labeled it “ME.” If one of Jensen’s own acolytes inspected the photograph closely, he might cluck with concern. While some of the fibers in Jensen’s irises resemble tightly woven silk (the sign of a sturdy constitution, according to Jensen’s teachings), other patches appear loosely knit, like burlap, a clue to major physical weaknesses. His irises reveal what Jensen says is the mark of lungs that are inherently susceptible to disease. He says his father, a rigid Dane who emigrated.to Stockton, California, around the turn of the century, enjoyed good health, but Eugen Jensen met and married a Danish girl named Anna who suffered from a persistent cough. Despite her frailty, the couple soon produced three children, the eldest of whom they named Jorgen Bernard.

Searching for work, Eugen took his young family to Detroit, where he found a job as a tool-and-die maker for Henry Ford. He loved machines and excelled at the work, but after a few years he decided to make a career shift and become a chiropractor. Today Jensen speculates that it was the mechanical aspects of chiropractic that appealed to his father. “He was a strict mechanical man. Getting things in proper position, posture, the placement of vertebrae and so forth — he was very good at all of that. ”

Once trained in the arts of spinal manipulation, Eugen practiced in Detroit for a while and then decided to return to California, settling in Oakland. There young Bernard also began to consider a career in chiropractic. But today he says his father’s example never inspired him. “We were never very close. We tended to be at odds; whatever he would suggest I would tend to be opposed to.” Instead, Jensen says it was a more personal brush with illness that impelled him to take interest in the healing arts. Tragedy had struck the family when Anna died of tuberculosis before she reached the age of thirty, and as Bernard, her eldest son, fought off repeated ailments, he sought to learn more about the workings of the body.

By the age of eighteen he had entered the West Coast Chiropractic College in Oakland, applying himself to his studies with a devotion that soon built — almost literally — to a fever pitch. His chronic cough worsened, and doctors told him they suspected TB. “Finally it got to the point that I lost the use of my arms. And my digestion was so bad ... I don’t even want to talk about my bowels, they were so bad.” At the same time, Jensen says he was sleeping only four hours per night and surviving on junk food — in his case, eighteen-inch-tall milkshakes popularly known as “Idiot’s Delights.” He says only gradually did it occur to him that his lifestyle might be influencing his problems. Since chiropractic alone wasn’t curing him, he began to think about nutrition.

This was foreign stuff for a youth raised on coffee and Danish pastries. “The first health stores that I knew were places where you would go down in a basement and they would take a scoop of whole wheat and put it in a bag and you'd take it home. The only health foods were maybe dates and pineapple. If you drank carrot juice, people thought you were crazy.” But a few lone pioneers were advocating a more "natural" lifestyle even back in the heat of the Roaring Twenties, and to their work Jensen turned his attention.

One such pioneer, who had died even before Jensen was born, was the true father of iridology, a Hungarian named Ignatz von Peczely. According to the now well-worn story, one day in 1837, when von Peczely was about eleven years old, he trapped an owl in his garden in Budapest. The bird struggled frantically and the youth accidentally broke its wing. As von Peczely and the owl glared at each other, the boy supposedly saw a black stripe appearing in the owl’s eye. Years later, after von Peczely grew up and became a physician, he remembered the incident as he attended soldiers wounded in the Boer War. Noting correlations between certain kinds of injuries and certain markings in the iris, he began to construct the first crude iridological chart.

When Jensen was a teen-ager, his father happened to introduce him to one of von Peczely’s early followers, a heavyset Chicago medical doctor named Henry Lindlahr. Lindlahr was interested at the time in so-called nature cures. “Those meetings [with Lindlahr] stamped me,” Jensen says. “They marked me because for the first time I realized here was something outside of chiropractic.” That spark probably motivated him a few years later to pick up from a shelf in his father’s library an “iridiagnosis” text written by a Los Angeles chiropractor. Jensen read it avidly.

He says at first he was skeptical of its claim that the eye was a window into the ills of the body. But within a few months of reading the book, an incident occurred which launched Jensen on the course toward True Belief. He says one afternoon a little dog came and put its head in his lap and he happened to notice a marking in its left iris at about one o’clock, precisely where the iridiagnosis text said epilepsy was manifested. “I thought, ‘How silly, dogs don’t have epilepsy.* But that afternoon [the dog] had seven convulsions while we were out picking blueberries.” Intrigued, he checked the eyes of a friend who also suffered from epilepsy — and he says he noted the same markings.

Jensen says he remained dubious, but throughout his years in chiropractic college and immediately following his graduation, he searched out and examined alternative healing doctrines as passionately as any mystic seeking a guru. After becoming a chiropractor, he enrolled in the American School of Naturopathy in New York City. There he studied with a man who had arrived from Germany armed with only a sprinkling can, a few herbs, the Water Cure Treatment theories of Father Sebastian Kneipp, and the conviction that those plus sunshine were all he needed to restore anyone to perfect health. That same year, 1931, Jensen also trained with a New Jersey naturopath who required Jensen to make color drawings of 500 different eyes and all their various “lesions.“ Today the Escondido resident says, “This is where I really learned to look into the eye.”

This preoccupation with irises continued to absorb him upon his return to Oakland and the subsequent establishment of his own chiropractic practice. He says he and another Bay Area chiropractor named Richard McLain devoted every Wednesday and Friday night to peering into and trying to make sense of what they saw around the pupils of willing human guinea pigs. And Jensen soon was collecting the case histories that erased the last of his reservations. “I became so extremely interested in this that I lived it day and night. It was a great learning period,” he says.

He remembers one woman who came in for a simple neck adjustment. Before administering it to her, however, Jensen scrutinized her irises and noticed a cluster of pinpoints in the “neck” area that he had never before noted in the iridology literature. Concerned, he ordered her first to get an X-ray, and he says it surprisingly revealed that she had Pott’s disease, tuberculosis of the spine. “I would have broken that lady’s neck if I had adjusted her. I was deeply thankful to lridology for stopping me in my tracks.”

He gives another example: a boy from Salt Lake City who for three years had suffered from pains in his left leg. Salves, rubbing, pummeling, physical activity, massage, and reflex therapy all had failed to help. “When I looked in the iris of the eye I found a black degenerative condition in the sigmoid colon, opposite the leg area,” Jensen remembers. Convinced that this was the culprit, he demanded that the boy have an X-ray. “He did and we found a cancer in the sigmoid colon.” Within six months, the lad was dead.

Jensen can recite dozens of similar examples, and he says ail these experiences prompted him to enlarge upon existing charts of the irises, adding information and correcting some previous misconceptions. By 1941, six years after he had moved his practice to Los Angeles, he began working on his 360-page magnum opus, The Theory and Practice of Iridology. It was to take him eleven years to complete.

During those years, however, he was devoted to many other projects. He soon grew dissatisfied with merely reading his patients’ eyes and merely prescribing some nutritional regimen. His belief grew that “most people have to be taught what to do. I wanted to take care of people and put them right under my thumb.” So he began founding sanitariums: a twenty-five-bed facility in San Leandro, a thirty-bed one in Ben Lomond (near Santa Cruz), a twenty-two-bed place in Altadena. By the time his textbook was finally finished and his fame began to spread, he felt ready for something really grand — his own version of a sort of iridological Mayo Clinic, a haven where he could work on healing the sick and dying, and creating the world’s healthiest people.

The question of which geographical and climatic factors aid such people was one that had fascinated Jensen since the days when he was in chiropractic school, and he began traveling in search of answers shortly after his graduation. Today he can boast of having lived for nine days with the king of the Hunza tribe in the legendary Shangri-la valley near the Chinese border in Pakistan. He has journeyed to the tiny village of Vilcabamba in the mountains of Ecuador, where the populace claimed never to develop any heart disease. He has conferred with the Dalai Lama in Tibet, and in the Balkans he has photographed and interviewed dozens of virile centenarians. In all his travels, he says his single-minded goal was to discover which lifestyle factors fostered or inhibited health.

Among the things he noticed was that the world’s oldest people always lived in the mountains, and in areas where grapes can be grown. When he sought to duplicate those conditions somewhere in Southern California, he says his search finally led him to purchase more than 200 acres of San Diego County property, just a few miles down the road from Lake Wohlford. “Escondido is on the same latitude as Greece,” Jensen writes in his book about his findings on longevity, World Keys to Health and Long Life. "Greece, the upper part of Italy, Turkey, Iraq, Iran, the southern part of Russia, etc., are all found in this same . . . belt where people can live this long life and have the greatest strength. ... I believe that Escondido could have the name of probably one of the best of our long-life centers in the whole country.”

He christened the sanitarium he established there the Hidden Valley Health Ranch, and soon it was crowded with visitors. Jensen says the ranch commonly ministered to eighty-five to ninety patients at a time, many of whom arrived in wheelchairs. “The average ones stayed for a month or so, but many stayed for a year, and one man, Mr. Worthington, stayed some sixteen years. He finally died a short time ago, at ninety-six,” Jensen says.

Another patient, who boasts an even more remarkable tenure, is a sparrow of a woman named Meta Schute; she still lives on Jensen’s current compound. Schute peers out at the world through thick glasses and under a dense thatch of white hair. She recalls that she first heard about Jensen twenty-five years ago when she read in a Detroit health food store a notice of an upcoming lecture by the iridologist. At the time, Schute suffered from ulcerated colitis, which a succession of doctors had failed to cure. Inspired by Jensen’s lecture, she journeyed westward to Escondido, where Jensen put her on a diet of nothing but goat’s milk, and watched her symptoms disappear. “I saw improvement so I decided to stay on,” Schute says. Eventually she became accepted as a full-time employee. She’s almost sixty-six now. To this day she still eats little else besides the goat’s milk — two raw egg yolks daily, some occasional carrot juice, and liquid chlorophyll. “I’ve tried other foods but I’ve had too much distress. It isn’t worth it to me,” she says timidly. “I can say if it wasn’t for Dr. Jensen I wouldn’t be here.”

Jensen seems almost embarrassed by the extremity of Schute’s diet; it's much too severe for most people, he asserts, but nonetheless Schute has thrived on it. Over the years, therapies at the health ranch reflected a similar eclecticism.

He recalls that at one point he employed four or five gardeners who organically farmed all the food consumed by ranch residents (except for avocados — which Jensen purchased from a neighbor — and tropical fruits). “We had our own goats and a grape vineyard. At one point we were serving 3000 pounds of carrots per month in the form of carrot juice!”

Jensen had a staff of fifty-five people who helped to give classes in his nutritional theories, to lead the morning t’ai ch’i sessions and hikes, to tend the extensive sprout department, to administer to patients the Jensenized version of Father Kneipp’s watery therapy. “We had thousands of people who went away on a better way of living, and who had been taught not only to regain their health, but to also retain it,” Jensen says with a contented sigh.

Throughout most of the ranch’s history, he continued to commute twice weekly up to the office he maintained for forty-two years on West Seventh Street in Los Angeles. But he says about five years ago he finally began to feel fatigued under the burden of his multiple activities. In the fall of 1977 he finally closed the ranch and sold all but twenty-six acres of his property, with the intention of devoting himself to writing, teaching, and traveling.

Today Jensen’s Chinese-style headquarters building still bustles with activity. In fact, he employs a staff of eighteen people, including two editors and three artists who are preparing for the publication of the first major technical sequel to his basic iridology text. The new book will be 650 pages long and it will include some 1200 photographs, Jensen says. It will incorporate his latest, most elaborate charts of the iris; it will record the numerous anecdotes that still form the major support for Jensen’s belief in iridology; and it will propound what there is of a theoretical basis for that system.

“Studies have shown that if we look at something horrible, the pupil contracts. If we look at something beautiful, it relaxes. Today they’ve even developed ways of telling if you’re really in love by measuring the reactions of the pupil,’’ Jensen states fervently. “Now, if the pupil responds that way, then every other point in the eye is going to respond in the same way. All the other fibers are responding to both internal and external stimuli."

He explains that the basic iridological pattern with which a person is born cannot ever change, since it represents inherited strengths and weaknesses. Only two elements in the iris can change, Jensen asserts: the shades of its tissue fibers can become blacker or whiter (as the corresponding organs in the body get more or less diseased), and secondly, fine white (almost imperceptible) lines, which resemble the darning in a repaired sock, appear as an individual “heals.”

These knitting or healing lines are so hard to see that Jensen says it has been only within the last year or so that he and the Orange County optical company he works with have developed a camera sufficiently sensitive to record their presence. “We have five different patents on that camera,” he boasts, explaining that among its innovations are a new type of lighting that reduces glare, and a lens that corresponds to the curvature of the eye to allow for a perfect focus. “This is the thing that’s going to prove iridology, I am convinced! Before, you always had to believe what I said.”

Besides working on his publishing projects, Jensen usually travels at least one week per month, sometimes far afield. Last year he spent a month in China, two weeks in South Africa, and two and a half weeks in England, lecturing everywhere to eager crowds of health seekers and practitioners. Additionally, he still tries to devote about one week per month to classes, which are conducted on his remaining Escondido property. A few weeks ago, for example, he was immersed in giving a week-long “rejuvenation” course.

This was a program aimed at teaching essentially well people Jensen’s principles of proper living. I found about twenty-five people gathered in a sunny classroom whose windows opened out onto a sparkling mountain vista. Under the inside wall of each window was a flower box filled with plastic flowers and decorated with a slogan, such as “Every organ helps every other organ.” Among the students were nine men whose ages spanned several generations, and a high proportion of exceptionally attractive young women: lean, glossy-haired, and rosy-cheeked. Everyone sat around card tables and many people took notes.

Jensen, looking relaxed and energetic, lectured from the front of the room. Earlier in the week he had covered the basics of his nutritional philosophy. Like all naturopaths, Jensen believes that diseases develop in tissue that is chemically ill-fed. Thus, half the secret of health is to consume the right chemicals, achieved through a program that defies easy summary. Certainly one of its cornerstones is a reliance on simple, unprocessed foods. Jensen also has worked out a scheme for the proportions to be consumed at each meal; breakfast, for example, should consist of a starch, a protein, a fruit, and a specially blended “health drink.” Dinner should be a protein, two vegetables, and a health drink.

But there is more, much more, than this. After a half a century in this business, Jensen is a walking, if not-very-well-indexed, encyclopedia of dietary tidbits. “Do you know what cayenne pepper will do for the blood? Hm?” he asks the class. “You should! Cayenne pepper is the greatest thing for driving the blood into an infection and clearing it out.” He tells them one of the nicest things for hypoglycemia is blueberry tea. Standing in front of the class, he rambles amiably, dispensing one morsel of advice after another. “It takes a year to get cream of wheat out of that shoulder, to get that Aunt Jemima out of that knee. It takes a year, friends, to replace that tissue. Hm?” From time to time one of the glowing young women raises a hand in question. “Yes, darling?” Jensen asks gently. His smile is beatifically sweet, but he nails down the questions swiftly and precisely.

In Jensen’s view, the other half of the secret to health is insuring that the organs of elimination — not just the kidneys and bowel but also the skin and bronchial tubes — function efficiently and dispose of all the body’s “toxins.” Proper elimination almost seems an obsession at times among Jensen’s following. Earlier this week he showed this group a slide presentation of what he claims are the results of the pressurized colonic flushings given over the years to very ill patients — gruesome shots of almost unbelievably grotesque fecal material that unfailingly leaves observers dazed.

The only black person in this group, a vigorous, bearded young man, interrupts Jensen with a related question. He explains that he formerly smoked a joint of marijuana per day for a period of about two years. “I did find that it soothed the bowel,” he says eagerly. “It did create consistent bowel movements. I mean, they were twelve inches long and buoyant, and everything. What do you think of that?”

“Do you really need marijuana for that?” Jensen’s tone makes it clear that indeed you do not. “A well body doesn’t need to go on these trips.” He continues, pointing out that marijuana is a drug and as such does not contribute to one’s health and well-being. The young man asks if Jensen knows of any studies documenting marijuana’s ill effects, but when Jensen refers him to government studies, the young man retorts, “I don’t believe them, though. I believe you!”

In addition to teaching such “rejuvenation” classes, Jensen regularly gives courses in iridology itself. This past January, for example, he lectured in Escondido to two groups of sixty students each. Though Jensen points out that he doesn’t certify anyone, several of his former students have set up their own iridological “practices” in the San Diego area. Since I wanted to see what it was like to consult an iridologist, not as a reporter, but as an ostensible health seeker, I wandered into the New Seed, a Pacific Beach health food store, one day in search of a referral.

The woman behind the counter weighing soybeans confessed that she knew nothing about iridology but advised me to ask Michael, the rangy young man back at the juice bar. When I told him I wanted to learn more about the subject, he enthusiastically urged me to contact a practitioner named Ray Kent.

He said that Kent divided his time between Santa Barbara and San Diego, but he could be contacted through a fellow named Gary who gave colonic “irrigations” at Community Works health center in Hillcrest. Indeed, when I telephoned Gary, he made an appointment for me, and gave me directions to the Winnebago camper that serves as Kent’s home and office. I would find it parked in Balboa Park, near Spruce Street and Sixth Avenue, Gary instructed me.

Before hanging up, I asked if Kent had studied with Jensen. “Yeah, he has. But Ray doesn’t really like it when people ask about that. He thinks what counts is not who he studied with, but what kind of work he does,” he advised, then continued, “I think you’ll really be impressed with Ray. I mean, Bernard Jensen’s a beautiful guy, but he’s still overweight. He eats pastries and everything else, which is his privilege. But he puts everyone on fasts and stuff and then he doesn’t follow his own advice. Ray lives what he preaches.”

When I found the Winnebago in the fading light one Friday afternoon a few weeks ago, I discovered that though Kent is lithe and muscular, his face looks older than Jensen’s. Deep wrinkles furrow his face. His thick mane of shoulder-length hair is a mix of gray and white, as is his beard and mustache, giving him the look of a geriatric Jesus. Without much ado, he urged me to take a seat inside the vehicle in front of a machine that looked as if it would belong in an optometrist’s office. Quickly he photographed each iris separately, then he peered into them for a few seconds. He settled himself down next to- me at the Winnebago’s little table.

“You’ve had a lot of problems, haven’t you, girl?’’ he said in a low, sympathetic voice colored by a faint Irish lilt. “You’ve had your ups and downs,” he said to my ambivalent response. He reached for a pad of white paper and began writing out what looked like a multipage prescription. From time to time he would pick up a flashlight and a magnifying glass, peer into my eyes, then return to his writings.

“You need exercise, badly.”

“What kind of exercise?” I asked.

“Walking, with lots of deep breathing.” When I told him I was already running and taking aerobic dance classes, he approved of the dance but said to cut out the running. “Because you’re prolapsed,” he imperiously answered my query. “Your intestines are hanging like a lump in the bottom of your belly, and that’s tipping your uterus forward a bit.”

He said I “desperately” needed sunlight, that one side of my thyroid was over-active while the other was under-active, and that my bowel was congested, my right ovary was tired, my right kidney was weak. I couldn’t confirm or deny most of what he said, although I did tell him that, his insistence notwithstanding, I wasn’t suffering from any “vaginal discharge.” In turn, he failed to mention my one persistent health problem — high blood pressure. Nonetheless I felt mildly chagrined when he gravely told me, “You’ve got a lot of cleansing to do. I’m not going to say you’re about to die or anything right away. But if you don’t take action immediately and make some changes, you ’re in for a lot of problems.”

He told me to change my diet immediately to include fifty percent raw food, and to discontinue the use of vitamins, flesh, dairy, and all refined foods. He said I should spend fifteen minutes lying on a slant board twice a day, conscientiously brush the entire surface of my skin, soak my feet in hot and cold water daily and then massage them, ingest three separate herbal concoctions, and more. “Come back again in twenty days and we’ll start your fast.” His bill was twenty-eight dollars; the next day the herbs and De-Tox Brew tea, which I bought at the New Seed, came to more than twenty.

Three weeks later, when I returned to the camper in the park, I could at least boast that I had faithfully taken all the herbs, even if I hadn’t followed every other one of Kent’s prescriptions. But he didn't ask how well I’d done. Instead he shined the light in my eyes once again and muttered that my bowel was “still hanging down low.”

“Do you see any changes?” I asked hopefully.

“A few,” he grunted. “I see a few. Not as many as I’d like to see. But you didn’t stick with it a hundred percent, did you?” He fixed me with a knowing stare.

Before I left him, I asked him about Jensen, and he acknowledged that he had “interned” with the man. When I asked about Jensen’s skill, Kent said curtly, “He’s very good.” But he quickly added that Jensen charged several hundred dollars for one of his classes in iridology. “He travels all over the world. He’s been in it for fifty years. And he doesn’t come cheap,” he said.

So a few weeks later, when one of Jensen’s vivacious young staff members offered to photograph my eyes and have the master give me a free reading, I accepted eagerly. Not long afterward I received a five-and-a-half-page, single-spaced “analysis” of those slides by Jensen. First, he hastened to restate one of his most common assertions: that iridology doesn’t “tell disease” from the eyes, but that “we are interested in where the inflammations are and in what stage they exist,” the report read.

He said my irises revealed a “medium constitution.” “Your greatest weakness is in the bowel area. . . . There are some large pockets that need care. He said my bronchial tubes were “especially weak,” and that I had ‘ ‘quite a catarrhal settlement in the lymph glands.” Like Kent, he saw “weakness” in my right ovary and kidney, but Jensen further claimed to detect breast swelling, vocal cord congestion, poor leg circulation, “a little anemia” in the extremities, many "healing signs” in my intestinal tract, and much more. Unlike Kent, he did address my blood pressure. “There is somewhat of an underactivity in the adrenal glands, which may sometimes bring on a lower blood pressure than usual.” A dead miss.

I told Jensen about this the next time I interviewed him, and he looked a bit nonplussed. “I really shouldn't have said that,” he said, explaining that normally he manually takes a blood pressure reading from all his patients. He explained that he had seen the adrenal gland “weakness” and deduced low blood pressure from that. “But there are other things that can bring up a blood pressure. . . . You can take the lowest blood pressure and if you irritate a person enough he can develop high blood pressure,” he stated.

I assured him that he had scored some hits, such as noting my bronchial problems. Privately, I still felt I could hardly pass judgment on the validity of Jensen’s beloved science; however, I subsequently talked with a young man who not long ago undertook the first serious effort to evaluate iridology scientifically.

His name is Dr. Allie Simon, and today he is taking his residency training in family practice through the UCSD medical school. At first he was reluctant to discuss his iridological research because he disliked the thought of appearing to attack Jensen, whom he still deeply respects. But finally he agreed to meet me at Navy Hospital one day during his lunch break. Simon is a clean-shaven young man, as skinny as a greyhound, with very pale skin and very black hair, swept back from his forehead. He displays a reserve which suggests not timidity but gentleness.

He was raised in Detroit, where he had little contact with “new-age” phenomena. Only when he moved to San Diego to attend medical school about 1975 did he encounter the intriguing holistic medicine chest, filled with its prescriptions for everything from diet to foot massage. Simon says from the first time he heard about iridology, he loved the concept. “I thought you don’t look into your patients' eyes enough as a doctor, it’s so impersonal.’’ He bought Jensen’s book, read it, and when he saw that the iridological expert lived in Escondido he contacted him, and subsequently took one of Jensen’s classes. Upon completion of the course, Simon says, “I was still very intrigued with it. I wasn’t sure."

From his medical school studies, he knew that Western science has detected the signs of many diseases in the iris, among them syphilis, tuberculosis, diabetes, atherosclerosis, rheumatic disorders, and numerous other ailments. What the established medical community doesn’t acknowledge, and what most doctors hold in great contempt, is the more far-reaching notion that all diseases — and indeed the state of health of every organ in the body — can be deciphered from the wispy tissue configurations surrounding the pupil.

Lacking scientific evidence, Simon didn’t share that prejudice, although he says one aspect of Jensen’s teachings did bother him. He too had viewed Jensen’s disgusting photographic documentation of the products of dramatically blocked bowels. “I think if you talk to iridologists, you get the impression that your colon is just filthy,” Simon says. However, he also knew that when he began observing colon examinations in medical school, he occasionally saw that "people who drink and smoke and do all that bad stuff had pink, beautiful mucosa [the inner lining of the colon] that looked perfectly fine.” Jensen explained this away to Simon by stating that the toxins were often hidden within the very walls of the bowel and thus were invisible to the probing medical eye. So Simon withheld judgment and began to consider iridology as a possible subject for the research project that is required for graduation from medical school at UCSD.

He says Jensen was open to the idea, and the two men discussed the project at length. Simon’s idea was to pick some ailment that both iridologists and medical doctors felt they could detect, and to compare the diagnostic success rate of both. Simon says at first Jensen wanted the experiment to concentrate on the colon area since he felt most comfortable with analyzing it. But Simon rejected that idea because Western medical tools for examining the colon tend to look at phenomena different from those inspected by iridologists, and thus the diagnoses wouldn’t be comparable.

Simon instead suggested that the experiment focus on kidney dysfunction, since medical doctors detect its presence with a simple blood test administered to nearly everyone who is hospitalized. Despite a few reservations, Jensen expressed confidence that iridology could accurately reveal kidney problems. The Escondido practitioner even lent the medical student a camera. ‘‘I really appreciated that,” Simon says.

It took Simon almost two years to collect photographs of some 300 different pairs of irises. "But I was really happy to do it. I was that interested in the work, ” he says. He also recalls that at times when he was photographing the eyes of people undergoing hemodialysis — those whose kidneys effectively were not functioning at all — he noticed that according to the standard he had learned from Jensen, the kidney area of their irises looked good, rather than diseased. ‘‘I wondered what the iridologists would say about that.”

Finally, from the 300 pairs of photographs he selected 143 finalists, ninety-five of whom the hospital tests showed to have normal kidneys, twenty-four with mild to moderate kidney dysfunction, and twenty-four with severe kidney damage. Then he randomized those slides and in separate sessions he asked three San Diego County iridologists, including Jensen, to assess the health of the kidneys of each of the photographic subjects. As a control, he also asked three ophthalmologists to look at the slides and try to do the same by using whatever method they could dream up.

Today, Simon says, "My intent was not in the least to find iridology fallible. I thought that Dr. Jensen was being very sincere with people.” The willingness of all three iridologists to participate in the test bespoke their confidence that the method worked, Simon believes. Yet he says as soon as the iridologists began rating the slides, "I could tell they were blowing it.”

When the numbers were finally added up, Simon’s first impressions were confirmed with a vengeance. One of the three iridologists (another Escondido chiropractor who had practiced for more than forty years) identified the people with kidney disease eighty-eight percent of the time. However, he aid that eighty-eight percent of the normal people had kidney disease. The second iridologist fared almost as dismally, correctly identifying only thirty-seven percent of the diseased patients and fifty-six percent of the normal ones. Jensen performed the best, picking out fifty-seven percent of both the diseased and normal people. However, Simon’s mathematical analysis forced him to conclude that this wasn’t statistically significant. Ironically, one of the ophthalmologists in the control group did better than any of the iridologists.

“I was disappointed,” Simon admits frankly. Yet he had decided beforehand that “it wouldn’t be right to write it up only if it was positive.” So the Journal of the American Medical Association in September of 1979 carried an article co-authored by Simon and his two faculty advisers which concluded by stating that iridology had no value as a screening technique for detecting or diagnosing kidney disease, and by suggesting that the technique posed harm to people by misdiagnosing them. Simon says Jensen and the other two iridologists lost no time in reacting to it. “The article to them was a hostile blow.”

Not long ago I returned to Jensen’s mountain retreat to ask him about that experiment. Again we met in his office, a cluttered, old-fashioned room that is decorated, as are all Jensen's quarters, with enlargements of close-up color photographs Officers, one of Jensen’s several hobbies. The photos reflect his staunch belief that life is more than colonics and carrot juice, that a balanced healthy life should include physical beauty and joyful activities. I asked if it also could include an occasional dietary indulgence.

“I do not believe in extremism,” he readily acknowledged. “I feel you can make a disease out of this health work. ... We feel that it isn’t what you eat once in a while that counts. It’s what you do most of the time. You should live on good foods at least six days a week. And if you live well enough you’ll be healthy enough that if you do eat something wrong, your body will take care of it. When my wife and I go to Vienna, we’re not missing out on some of the lovely Viennese pastries they have there. But when we’re home we go right on the wagon again! We’re right back to our six vegetables, two fruits, one starch, and one protein daily.”

He seemed much more disconcerted by the topic of Simon’s experiment, and he groped for several different criticisms of it. First he says the quality of Simon’s photos was poor, not altogether Simon’s fault. “I don’t think iridology was developed quite far enough [at the time of the experiment] to use the photographic analysis entirely. ” The camera was hand-held and the lighting was poor, he asserts, with the result that “the photos were only capable of showing twenty-five percent of what iridology can really do.”

Jensen suggests that the laboratory tests and iridological examination for kidney disease might in some way be fundamentally incomparable. “They tried to insist on a laboratory connection with this. But there’s every possibility that their laboratory is not seeing what we do; that it is not picking up what we see, and that there is no correlation between the two.” Finally, he frets at the memory of the overall experimental design. “Iridologists have criticized the very fact that I even did it.” And maybe they’re right, he says unhappily. “I was asked to do in an hour and a half something that should have taken days. I had no time to think. No time to put it together. No time for cooperation. No time to know even what they wanted. And this is where I slipped. I kinda followed what they asked me to do. I did not insist that I should not do it.”

He is convinced that further experiments some day will be conducted and that, in fact, a golden day for iridology is dawning with the advent of computer analysis techniques. “A computer can tell things down to l/2500th of an inch. A man can only see to a fiftieth of an inch!” He says Simon’s experiment didn’t shake one iota of his faith in iridology. “Allie is a very sincere student and one of my best friends. And he's amazed by what I do with iridology. My analysis must have something in it to do the things I’m doing.”

How else can he explain all the thousands of patients who have improved under his ministrations? How else explain those volumes of amazing anecdotes? “I don’t think iridology will pass out. The good in it is something you cannot bury. It has meant too much to people in the natural healing arts. ” He seems to try very hard for a moment to envision abandoning it — and to fail. “I can’t go back on it,” he says quietly. “It's an impossibility to go back on it. . . .”