Kasper Blond

Kasper Blond (July 10, 1889 – September 20, 1964) was an Austrian surgeon, inventor and writer who proposed an alternative theory of cancer.

Early life Blond was born in Czernowitz, Duchy of Bukovina, in the Austro-Hungarian Empire on 10 July 1889, to a middle-class Jewish family. He had two brothers, Adolf and Kelman. Adolf later emigrated with him to the United Kingdom, and Kelman was executed in an extermination camp during The Holocaust.

First World War

Capture On July 1 1913, Blond finished his military service as a one-year volunteer, being part of the Imperial and Royal Infantry, 41st division. He joined the Czernowitz garrison hospital as an assistant surgeon on 9 August 1914, becoming an officer in the medical corps with rank Fähnrich. With the beginning of the First World War, on 24 September Blond was taken captive by the forces of the Russian Empire as they invaded and occupied the area. The Austrian Army had left the area moving north, Blond was left with the Czernowitz hospital. After his capture, Blond was taken as a prisoner of war alongside twenty-two other medics – they passed through Kyiv (27 September), Samara, and Orenburg by train; German soldiers were sent to Siberia, and Austrians to Turkestan. Blond was sent through Tashkent (7 October), Samarkand (9 October), and Bukhara (10 October) until he was sent to a camp in Ashgabat, Turkmenistan. At the camp, prisoners were separated by race: Slavs received the best treatment, and Jews the worst; Blond was housed in a hut without bedding. In Ashgabat, he worked as a doctor in the city hospital, as requested by a Russian medic general. This gave him relative freedom as compared to other prisoners; he had free movement in the city, and was allowed communication with the civil service. He also communicated with doctors in Europe about local diseases. Due to the terrible living conditions – prisoners regularly died from diseases such as dysentery and malaria, and were buried in unmarked grave in the woods – Blond raised the money to hire a Persian trafficker with three others, including two doctors.

Escape Escaping the camp on 15 November 1915, Blond crossed the Turkmen steppe with a guide, crossing into the Iranian province of Khorasan. This journey involved traversing the Turkmen-Khorasan Mountain Range overnight in civilian clothes, arriving in a town in Khorasan at midnight. From Khorasan, Blond's party headed south-west, eventually arriving in a small villages. Upon hearing that the party included doctors, many of the villagers came up to them to show them their illnesses. Sleeping in the house of a local family, continued travelling to the place of the area's anti-Russian governor, accompanied by the son of a local Khan whom they met. Initially, Blond's party were put under house arrest on suspicion of espionage, but were later set free with mules. In Tabar, Blond was suspected of being a Russian, and was forced to flee, crossing the Dasht-e Kavir, again staying with a local governor until 20 November. Near Damghan, Blond and his companions were chased by Cossack troops until Dowlatabad; the Russian empire had stationed Cossacks, particularly in the Persian Cossack Brigade, in Central Asia since the late 19th Century. On November 30, they arrived in Tehran, disguised as Turkmen, and reported to the Austrian military attaché there, and joining an Austrian detachment. However, due to the threat of a Russian invasion of Tehran, Blond quickly left the city and travelled to Qom, where he joined a German detachment under Max Otto Schünemann, and was involved in the fighting of the Persian campaign. With the German Army, Blond moved from Qom through Kashan and Isfahan, over the Zagros Mountains into Eastern Lorestan. The Russian Army had been pursuing the German troops since Isfahan, so they were forced to continue through Nahavand until they reached Sahneh. By this point, much of the detachment was suffering from frostbite and malaria, and Blond treated soldiers in the field hospital there. After this, they moved to Kermanshah, where the detachment was dissolved. After treating Turkish troops in a military hospital in Mahidasht, Blond succumbed to lice and was taken to Baghdad for treatment, where he was afflicted by cutaneous leishmaniasis. After recovery, he travelled through Ottoman Syria, and saw victims of the Armenian genocide in Aleppo in the spring of 1916, later writing:

From Aleppo, Blond travelled on the Anatolian Railway through Adana, Konya, Eskişehir, and Pera, and travelled to Constantinople by steamship. Hereafter, he moved through Sofia and Niš, stopping in each city to complete formalities. In Niš, Blond and his companions wanted to take an express train to Belgrade; the Austrian representative tried to stop them on the basis that the train was for the exclusive use of German holidaymakers in Macedonia, but conceded to let them travel after negotiations with Blond. Blond returned to Vienna in July 1916; upon his arrival, he stayed at the Austrian Ministry of War for five days as the officials did not know how to deal with him: as a former prisoner of war, volunteer in the German Army, or as a deserter; he was released and sent to the convalescence centre. In Vienna, he met with his father – his mother had died during the war – and wrote drafts of a memoir about his travels before finishing his medical studies at the University of Vienna, where he graduated M.D. in 1917. By 1917, he had advanced to the rank of Leutnant, and was sent to Palestine because of his knowledge of infectious and tropical diseases; he stayed there until the end of the war.

Ein Unbekannter Krieg

Ein Unbekannter Krieg, a memoir of Blond's time in Central Asia and return to Vienna, was originally published in 1931 in Vienna; an edition with a foreword by Peter Jung was published in 1997. After his return, Blond gave several talks about his experiences and published this work as the first part of a supposedly two-volume memoir; however, a second part never published. A manuscript for the second volume existed in the late 1950s, according to Jung's research. Annette Lechner views the work as being an example of the rise of pacifist-themed literature in the aftermath of the First World War.

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