The Hazzard Fasting Cure

regimen · 1908–1935

category:regimen

delivery:Prolonged near-total fasting on water and small quantities of vegetable broth, extended for days to weeks under residential supervision and supplemented by enemas and massage, at a fasting sanitarium.

price tier:elite

era:1908–1935

current status:historical

regulatory:unregulated

SHORT PITCH (AS SOLD)

Stop eating so the body can purge the impurities behind disease, and natural health is restored.

THE ACTUAL EVIDENCE

No controlled evidence supports fasting as a cure for chronic or organic disease. Prolonged total fasting causes starvation, and that was the documented result of Hazzard's regimen: at least fourteen patients in Washington died under her direct care between 1907 and 1913, and she was convicted of manslaughter in 1912 (Washington State Archives). The claim that fasting cures chronic or organic disease and restores lasting health is refuted, and the regimen as Hazzard administered it was lethal.

PRACTITIONERS

Linda Burfield Hazzard

CASES

hazzard-fasting-cure-1908-1935

CLAIMS

Disease arises when the blood becomes encumbered with impurities and the body succumbs to auto-intoxication; fasting cures disease by suspending food so the system can discharge those impurities and restore its natural balance. refuted
Once the system is cleared of accumulated impurity by fasting, the body is restored to its natural health and vigor, so that periodic fasting is the foundation of lasting health. refuted
Fasting cures chronic and organic disease, including conditions that conventional medicine treats as incurable. refuted

SOURCES

Fasting for the Cure of Disease (1908)
Linda Burfield Hazzard: Healer or Murderess? (2012)
The Doctor Who Starved Her Patients to Death (2014)

NOTES

The Hazzard fasting cure was a regimen of prolonged near-total fasting, taken on water and thin vegetable broth and sustained for days to weeks under residential supervision, with enemas and massage as adjuncts. Its rationale, set out in Hazzard’s Fasting for the Cure of Disease (1908), was that disease is the body’s effort to expel impurities accumulated in the blood, that auto-intoxication is the underlying harm, and that withholding food lets elimination run its course and restores natural health. The endpoints offered were surrogate and subjective: weight loss, a coated tongue and other discharges read as proof of elimination, and testimonials of feeling cleansed.

The regimen sat in the autointoxication-and-elimination tradition that runs through this archive, the same blood-impurity logic James Morison sold as the Hygeian pills, the internal-cleansing pitch of Tyrrell’s J.B.L. Cascade, and the intestinal-toxin theory Kellogg and Metchnikoff worked in the same years. In Hazzard’s hands the regimen was not merely unproven but fatal: extended near-total fasting is starvation, and at least fourteen of her Washington patients died of it between 1907 and 1913. The price tier was elite in practice; her residential patients included wealthy clients, among them the British heiresses Claire and Dorothea Williamson, whose 1911 case led to her manslaughter conviction.