The Gluttony Plague; or, How Persons Kill Themselves by Eating
primary document · 1870
LINK
SUMMARY
Primary-source book by James C. Jackson, M.D., identified on the title page as physician-in-chief at Our Home on the Hillside, Dansville, N.Y., published by Austin, Jackson & Co., a firm bearing his and his daughter Harriet Austin's names (digitized by the U.S. National Library of Medicine, digirepo.nlm.nih.gov/ext/dw/101190017/PDF/101190017.pdf, catalog record archive.org/details/101190017.nlm.nih.gov). The front matter advertises Our Home on the Hillside as treating patients under Jackson's self-described "Psycho Hygienic" method, without giving any of them any medicine at all, and states a fee of $6.00 for a mail-order home prescription. Back-matter advertising for Jackson's companion volume asserts that no disease the human body is subject to has proved incurable under Psycho Hygienic treatment, explicitly naming pulmonary consumption (tuberculosis) among the diseases claimed curable by the method, in contrast to ordinary drug medication, and cites tens of thousands of consumptive persons in the United States as prospective beneficiaries. Fetched directly as a PDF from the NLM digital repository on 2026-08-04; because the scanned volume's embedded text layer uses a non-standard character encoding that fragments word order on extraction, quotations here are close paraphrase rather than a verbatim transcription, and no verify-quotes block is used for this source.
NOTES
James C. Jackson’s own 1870 book and its advertising back matter are the primary-source basis for the case’s central claim: that Our Home on the Hillside cured disease, including tuberculosis, through diet, water, and hygiene alone, without any medicine, and that thousands of patients had already been treated “with most eminent success.” Published by Austin, Jackson & Co., a firm bearing his and his daughter’s names, the volume is also evidence for the case’s financial-conflict element: Jackson’s own books, promoting his own method, were sold at his own institution.