Ann Wigmore

The Foundation moved to New Mexico after Wigmore's death; it lost IRS accreditation as a nonprofit in 2012.

Wigmore died in Boston on February 16, 1994, of smoke inhalation from a fire at the Ann Wigmore Foundation building at 196 Commonwealth Avenue. She had written about twenty five books and had lectured on her ideas in the US, Canada, and Europe.

Wigmore was sued by the Massachusetts Attorney-General's department in 1988 for publishing pamphlets falsely claiming to offer an AIDS cure. She claimed that AIDS arises from "the body's inability to assimilate the food consumed" and for around $400 (about $700 in 2016) sold lessons to make an "energy enzyme soup" that she said allowed an infected person's body to completely clear the virus. She was acquitted under the First Amendment as the claims were deemed not to be commercial claims made in trade, but was ordered not to misrepresent herself as a doctor qualified to treat illness or disease.

Brian Clement obtained control over the Hippocrates Health Institute and moved it from Boston to West Palm Beach, Florida, in 1987.

In 1982 the Rising Sun Church acquired the building next door, and changed its name to the Hippocrates Health Institute, Inc. She was sued in 1982 by the attorney general of Massachusetts for promoting a cure for diabetes and for claiming that she could make it unnecessary for children to be vaccinated; she stopped making those claims after losing in court.

In 1980, the US House of Representatives Select Committee on Aging began what became a four-year investigation into health care scams that preyed on older people. Their findings were published in 1984 in a report titled "Quackery, a $10 Billion Scandal", commonly referred to as "The Pepper Report" after committee chairman Claude Pepper.

During the mid-1960s, Wigmore, as "Reverend Ann Wigmore", and Rising Sun Christianity, Inc., which she controlled, bought property at 25 Exeter Street in Boston's Back Bay, where she lived and where Rising Sun had offices, as carved into its glass and door. She also founded The Ann Wigmore Foundation Inc., which received accreditation as a nonprofit from the IRS in 1970. In 1974, Rising Sun Christianity applied to the city to convert the building into a church, a holistic school, and apartments, which was granted for five years, and was extended in 1980.

In the 1940s Wigmore started promoting the benefits of wheatgrass and other raw foods in order to "detox", removing what she considered to be poisons of "unnatural" cooked foods and food additives added by industrial society; she believed this diet allowed and helped the body to heal itself. She believed that fresh wheatgrass juice and fresh vegetables - and especially chlorophyll - retained more of their original energy and potency (a form of vitalism) if they were uncooked and eaten as soon as possible after harvesting them.

On December 25, 1930, Anna Marie (again under the name "Warap" per wedding coverage Stoughton News-Sentinel, 1 Jan 1931) married Everett Arnold Wigmore (1907–1969), of Stoughton, Massachusetts, where they lived during their marriage. Her husband was in the family stone masonry business. A daughter, Wilma Edith Wigmore, was born on July 9, 1941. On January 12, 1942, Wigmore became a United States citizen. The Wigmores divorced sometime in the 1950s–1960s.

Ann Wigmore (March 4, 1909 – February 16, 1994) was a Lithuanian–American holistic health practitioner, naturopath and raw food advocate.

In 1904 Bircher-Benner opened a sanatorium in the mountains outside of Zurich called "Lebendinge Kraft" or "Vital Force," a technical term in the Lebensreform movement that referred especially to sunlight; he and others believed that this energy was more "concentrated" in plants than in meat, and was diminished by cooking. Patients in the clinic were fed raw foods, including muesli which was created there. While these ideas were dismissed by scientists and the medical profession of his day as quackery, they gained a following in some quarters.

Wigmore was inspired in part by the ideas of Maximilian Bircher-Benner (1867–1939), who was influenced as a young man by the German Lebensreform movement, which saw civilization as corrupt and which sought to go "back to nature"; it embraced holistic medicine, nudism, various forms of spirituality, free love, exercise and other outdoors activity, and foods that it judged were more "natural". Bircher-Benner eventually adopted a vegetarian diet, but took that further and decided that raw food was what humans were really meant to eat. He was influenced by Charles Darwin's ideas that humans were just another kind of animal, noting that other animals do not cook their food.