Bodog Beck

Bodog Beck M.D. (Budapest, Hungary, 1871 – New York City, January 1, 1942) was an American physician. He became famous for his studies about apitherapy.

Beck was a product of the central European world of the late nineteenth century that produced such other therapeutic pioneers as Sigmund Freud, Ignaz Semmelweis, the father of modem antisepsis, and Phillip Terc, M.D. of Marburg, Austria, who has justly been identified as the father of modern apitherapy.

He was fascinated with nature as a boy. His early years involved him taking on the task of raising his own honey bees. This, in turn, led him deeper into what would become a life-long exploration into all aspects of the world of the honey bee.

He served in his nation's armed forces during the First World War, after which he emigrated to the United States where he settled in New York City. By the early 1930s, when Charles Mraz encountered him, he had established a thriving Park Avenue practice among the elite of New York's upper east side. Though he was on the staff of a local hospital. Saint Mark's, as a medical practitioner, his first love was apitherapy and it was to this discipline that he assiduously devoted himself until his death.

Beck's apiteraphy studies
Over the many years during which he practiced apitherapy he treated thousands of patients with many varied medical conditions. He, as much as anyone else utilizing bee venom for therapeutic purposes, came to understand the potential uses and definite limitations of this approach to therapy. According to Charles Mraz, he was fond of saying that when he didn't know what else to offer patients to help alleviate their condition he could always turn to apitherapy. However he did not consider apitherapy a panacea any more than any other approach, no matter how powerful, could be so considered.

Bodog Beck, besides being a highly renowned physician, was also a scholar in his chosen field, apiculture. He had an enormous personal library with books and materials in many languages from every part of the world. He had dedicated himself for years to collecting everything he could find (monographs, journal literature, personal notes, pictorial matter, ephemera, etc.) related to bees and especially bee venom therapy. He was personally fluent in all of the languages of his collection which, besides most modem European tongues, also included Latin and Ancient Greek. He also devoted himself to amassing a collection of Napoleonic materials with Napoleon's honey bee emblem.

Honey and other bee products were also of great interest to Bodog Beck who learned quite a bit about their history and medicinal uses. Much of this knowledge he later passed on to us in a highly original work, Honey and Your Health. An enlarged edition co-authored by Doree Smedley was issued sometime later and has been republished by Health Resources Press.

In the early 1930s he utilized several bee journals to circulate a questionnaire to bee keepers around the world. It consisted of ten questions dealing with such topics as sensitivity to venom in people who are repeatedly being exposed to and being stung on a daily basis by bees, the nature of their symptoms resulting from being stung, treatments for bee stings, the effect of the bee stings on their overall health as well as the effect on any specific pre-sting disease conditions, their knowledge of these matters as pertains to others they know, including cases of paralysis and cancer, personal and other cases of mortality and morbidity relating to honey bee stings, and any additional related details.

Bee venom teraphy (book)
This book was issued in 1935 by a prestigious New York publisher, D. Appleton-Century Company, and then allowed to languish after the printing sold out. Only seven years later the author died. This work was his magnum opus, the realization and summation of a distinguished career devoted to the practical and scientific exploration of the nature and use of honey bee venom.

It wasn't until 1981, almost forty years later, that a dedicated osteopathic physician, L.A. Doyle, D.O., of Osage, Iowa reissued the original work complete with two introductions; one written by him and the other by Charles Mraz, a longtime student of Doctor Beck who in the early 1930s had been successfully treated by Beck as a patient. This volume, like its antecedents, quickly sold out.