Ellie Rotunno (aka Elnora Van Winkle) died. She never hinted to this RAW-FOOD@MAELSTROM message board that she was feeling sick or unwell or had anything wrong with her. Upon further inquiry, Bob Avery, publisher of M2M, a Natural Health periodical, received the following by email from a friend of hers, Therese Dubuls: "It is with deepest regret that I have to confirm the death of our dear Ellie on August 6th, 2001. She got ill with pancreatic cancer late spring/early summer and had to undergo surgery on August 3rd, yet at that time nothing could be done to save her life.She called me on the phone a mere 3 hours before she died, asking me to take over her work and be her literary executor. I met her on the Web, back in January 1999, and we got to know each other and ended up really close friends. I visited her in NYC in December 2000, and it looks like I was well inspired to do so. Her family sent me her files in October, and I'm hoping to have them all by Christmas. I shall try to maintain her Web sites and her discussion groups and have her book published, but at this time I'm really busy because I'm the happy mother of three lively children, aged 6 years, 19 months and 4 months.Ellie was under heavy medication, but also under severe emotional stress throughtout her life up until age 62, when she started to eat raw food and work her redirecting self-therapy. Because she had turned to raw food, she didn't forsee that she had cancer until Aug. 3rd when she was cut open and discovered what was going on - after that she did not get back home and only told me on the phone that she had several strange symptoms before but simply identified them as having had something unclean to eat." Bob Avery wrote " I don't know what else to add to that, except that this is a great loss to our natural health community as well as to her friends and family. Before checking out of this world, she put in a great effort to get her hygienic theory of mental illness published in a peer-reviewed scientific journal, succeeding only after many months of critiques, and rejections from various closed-minded journal editions. Her paper, 'The Toxic Mind: the biology of mental illness and violence,' eventually was published in Medical Hypotheses 2000, 55(4): 356-368. Rather than rest on these laurels, she went further in setting up a self-help website and internet discussion group for those needing help with mental/emotional detoxification. She also wrote letters and distributed pamphlets to prison officals and head of state in many countries and told me that some correctional institutions were using her methods of repressed anger resolution in rehabilitating prisoners. She accomplished a great deal in the time allotted to her, yet she was only 73 when she died. May she rest in peace." Dr. Bernarr, D.C., D.D. God Healing, Inc. Natural Hygiene Society, Inc. P.O. Box 1523 Santa Monica California 90406 USA Telephone: 310-396-2914; 310-452-0458 Web Site: http://www.healself.org E-mail: [log in to unmask]