A Swiss doctor and a great scholar of Tradition, Bertholet was able to harmonise scientific research with his spiritual interests throughout his life.
Born in Switzerland at Rougemont, in the district of Vaud on June 8, 1883,[1] under the double sign of Gemini, Edouard never ceased duplicating, indeed multiplying his life and talents: medical doctor, writer, musician, esotericist.
[2] When he left the University of Lausanne, holding his medical titles, he seemed to be the son of an era that Tame and Renan oriented towards: a skeptical positiveness, and he saw the sciences as the only concrete answer to human problems.
He promised never again to taste the good wine and he rigorously kept his word, which tells us about the man: capable of paying with his self and of completely engaging himself within his research.
He then experimented with its effects on plants, seeds of nuts, watercress and especially marrow (squash), two pots of which he isolated and watered in the same manner.
“It constitutes a natural effort of the organism to get rid, by successive cleansing crises, the toxins and cellular poisons”.
He knew that some temperaments cannot stand such a treatment but the revitalising magnetism would be the palliative preventing the headaches and the nauseous state, which sometimes accompanies fasting.
They often watched the doctor eating with his family, but, strangely enough, none of them were hungry; within a few weeks they saw their general malaise, heart failure, nephritis and tuberculosis adenitis disappear.
Smiling and serious, the forehead high, the beard white towards the end of his life, attentive to human suffering, he personified the authentic therapist, the authority who pain does not resist.
A talented musician, his patients sometimes perceived late at night the echo of his violoncello carried by the myths of Tristan or Parsifal.
[7] The members flocked, fascinated by the stature, the universal culture of Dr Bertholet, and by the lecturers he invited, all bearers of unusual knowledge.
[4] The doctor shared them so well that he revived in 1933 the “Ordre Ancien et Mystique de la Rose+Croix”, (the Ancient and Mystic Order of the Rose+Cross)[10] — an extension of the psychic society which is a group of awareness and not of Initiation.
The writer Jean Palaiseul says he saw him there “aureoled by his white beard of a prophet and by his ascetic life, standing in front of a big crucifix and wooden polychrome statues depicting the verses of the Koran, arranged around a candelabra with seven branches”.