Jackson's Psycho Hygienic Method (Our Home on the Hillside water cure)

Give up medicine entirely. At Our Home on the Hillside, water, a strict meatless hygienic diet built around Jackson's own invented cereal Granula, exercise, and clean living cure disease -- including consumption -- that drug medication never has.

Jackson's own 1870 book and its advertising back matter claim that no disease the human body is subject to had proved incurable under his Psycho Hygienic method, and single out pulmonary consumption -- tuberculosis, then one of the leading causes of death in the United States -- as a disease his method could cure where "ordinary" drug medicine could not, citing an unspecified pool of tens of thousands of consumptive Americans as prospective beneficiaries. No controlled outcome study of any kind accompanies that claim; the supporting evidence in Jackson's own books, and in the institution's later promotional material, is patient testimonial (including one attributed to Clara Barton in the 1890 booklet). A peer-reviewed 2020 history-of-medicine assessment (Armocida & Martini, Journal of Preventive Medicine and Hygiene) confirms both that the causative organism of tuberculosis was identified by Robert Koch in 1882 -- during Jackson's own operating period -- and that the same hygiene-diet-exercise regimen Jackson practiced was, in general medical use for tuberculosis, symptomatic support rather than cure -- the seriously ill were unlikely to benefit from a sanatorium stay of that kind -- and effective treatment did not exist until streptomycin's introduction in 1943-44. Katherine Berdan's 2015 academic study of the institution (Pioneer America Society) attributes the water cure's eventual obsolescence to the era's "medical advances" in favor of "conventional medicine"; the Dansville Area Chamber of Commerce's local history states the 1914 bankruptcy of Jackson's institution came "citing advances in the medical field yielding the water cure obsolete." Susan Cayleff's academic history of the water-cure movement records that orthodox medicine of the period viewed hydropathy generally as a "crackpot therapeutic," though she attributes much of that marginalization to the movement's association with nineteenth-century social activism rather than treating it as a pure verdict on medical merit. No source in this bundle documents a controlled study, of any era, validating Jackson's disease-curing claims.