Linda Burfield Hazzard
Linda Burfield Hazzard (1867-1938) was an American fasting practitioner who, despite little formal training and no medical degree, was licensed in Washington as a “Fasting Specialist” through a loophole that grandfathered in alternative practitioners. She had studied with the fasting advocate Dr. Edward Hooker Dewey in Minnesota and moved to Washington in 1907, where she ran a residential fasting sanitarium at Olalla, in Kitsap County, that locals came to call “Starvation Heights.” In 1908 she self-published Fasting for the Cure of Disease, the statement of her method.
Her regimen of prolonged near-total fasting was not a cure but a danger. The Washington State Archives records that at least fourteen patients in Washington died of starvation under her direct care between 1907 and 1913. The 1911 death of the British heiress Claire Williamson, whose sister Dorothea survived the same treatment and testified against her, brought a prosecution in Kitsap County; on February 7, 1912 Hazzard 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. She is encoded as a promoter and her eventual_status as publicly_disconfirmed: the conviction, the death toll, and the revocation are matters of court and state record. She died in 1938 (HistoryLink).