Wilburn H. Ferguson was an American alternative-medicine practitioner, nurse, and Seventh-day Adventist missionary. He is best known for his claims to have found a cure for cancer from the substance used by the Shuar ethnic group of Ecuador in their traditional practice of headhunting. However, mainstream scientific institutions have never verified his claims about the substance's supposed curative properties, and it has not been developed into any contemporary medical treatment.
Personal life Ferguson was born in 1905 in Shawnee, Oklahoma and raised in National City, California. During his childhood, he became a member of the Seventh-day Adventist Church. In May 1930, he married his wife Ruth Ferguson, a nurse. In 1931, he moved to Peru to work at an Adventist mission in Sandia Province. He was later removed from his job as a missionary because of concerns that he was insufficiently engaged with spiritual concerns. His children were Eugene (Gene), Donald, Ralph, and Eileen Patricia (Patricia). Patricia later married his assistant Nicanor (Nico) Sangurima. When not engaged in research concerning his purported cure for cancer, Ferguson often worked as a nurse. During the 1940s, the Fergusons ran nursing homes. The U.S. Embassy in Ecuador reportedly looked into why Ferguson, as an American citizen, was supporting sending Carlos Egas Llaguno, an Ecuadorian communist, to the United States for him to receive police training.
Education Ferguson controversially described himself as a doctor, despite only having an honorary degree from the University of Cuenca and not having completed an associate degree. He had earlier attended colleges affiliated with the Seventh-Day Adventist religious movement. Ferguson claimed to have later studied anesthesiology with the Chicago anesthesiologist Dr. Ben Morgan.
Research with the Shuar Even before his time as a missionary, Ferguson had had a longstanding desire to work exploring remote regions of the world for medical plants, a practice that would develop into the fields of ethnobotany and ethnomedicine. When in Peru as a missionary, he learned about the Shuar practice of shrinking heads. He hypothesized that whatever practice could be used to produce shrunken heads could also be used to cure cancer tumors. His initial attempt to contact the Shuar, whom he referred to as the Jivaros, to learn more about this practice reportedly ended in disaster when many of the men accompanying him and a child working as Ferguson's assistant went missing and were thought to have been killed by the Shuar. Ferguson's next attempt to learn more about the way in which the Shuar shrunk heads came courtesy of his association with Ecuadorian president Galo Plaza. Plaza had gotten him and his wife Ruth a number of medical positions in Ecuador, which gave him government support in his attempts to find the Shuar. According to Ferguson, on a trip into Shuar territory he was able to convince a Shuar person whom he had healed using Western medical techniques to provide him with a pot of extract reportedly used for shrinking heads. After another trip treating the Shuar during a typhoid fever epidemic, he reportedly got to know a Shuar medicine man by the name of Tangamasha. Eventually the Shuar elders apparently gave Tangamasha permission to teach Ferguson how to make the substance and how to use it to shrink a monkey's head. He reported that the substance used about 30 plants, including cinchona, a plant that already had medical uses since it was the source of the antimalarial quinine. Tests by Ferguson, however, led him to conclude that many of the plants were not necessary and that he could achieve the same effects using only 8. Later, a step in which the substance was used to shrink a cow's head was added.
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