The Hazzard Fasting Cure

A license that said Doctor

A Washington license called Linda Burfield Hazzard (1867-1938) a ‘Fasting Specialist’, and she did not hesitate to call herself Doctor. She had little formal training and no medical degree; the license came through a loophole that grandfathered in alternative practitioners (Washington State Archives; Smithsonian Magazine). Her authority rested on that one word, on personal conviction, on her 1908 book Fasting for the Cure of Disease, and on her training with the fasting advocate Dr. Edward Hooker Dewey, with whom she had studied before moving to Washington in 1907 (Washington State Archives).

Inside Starvation Heights

Access took the form of residential confinement at Hazzard’s fasting sanitarium at Olalla, in Kitsap County, which locals came to call ‘Starvation Heights’. Patients paid to be supervised through fasts lasting days to weeks, isolated from family and from outside medical opinion; the wealthy came from a distance, including the British heiresses Claire and Dorothea Williamson, who came to her in 1911. The exclusivity was the supervised, fee-based confinement itself: once a patient was inside the regimen, weakened and cut off, the practitioner’s authority over food, correspondence, and money went largely unchecked.

A coated tongue counted as proof

The mechanism, set out in the 1908 book, was that disease is the body’s effort to cast out impurities that have accumulated in the blood, that auto-intoxication is the underlying harm, and that withholding food lets elimination proceed until natural health returns. There was no measurement and no defined endpoint: progress was read from surrogate and subjective signs, weight loss, a coated tongue and other discharges interpreted as impurities leaving the body, and the patient’s sense of being cleansed. The step from these signs to ‘cure’ was asserted, not demonstrated, and the same blood-impurity logic had been sold by James Morison three generations earlier.

Starved of food and of money

Hazzard charged for residential treatment and sold the book that prescribed it, and she profited from patients beyond their fees. The Washington State Archives records that some patients turned over land, inheritance, or power of attorney to her before they died. In the Williamson case the prosecution described a parallel ‘financial starvation’: forged checks and letters that drained Claire Williamson’s estate while she was being starved (Smithsonian Magazine). The conflict is stated as the records support it. A residential operation also paid for premises, staff, and supplies, so the point is not that Hazzard was the only party who profited but that she took direct financial control of patients who were in her care and physically failing.

A body count a court could read

The regimen did not cure; it starved. The Washington State Archives records that at least fourteen patients in Washington died of starvation under Hazzard’s direct care between 1907 and 1913. The 1911 death of Claire Williamson, whose sister Dorothea survived the same treatment and testified, produced a prosecution in Kitsap County: Hazzard was arrested on August 15, 1911, and on February 7, 1912 she was convicted of manslaughter and sentenced to two to twenty years, surrendering to the penitentiary at Walla Walla in December 1913, with her medical license revoked (Washington State Archives; Smithsonian Magazine). The disconfirmation here is not a quiet failure to replicate but criminal conviction and a body count. Hazzard herself died in 1938 (HistoryLink).