The Doctor Who Starved Her Patients to Death

Dr. Linda Hazzard ran the Institute of Natural Therapeutics in Olalla, Washington, in the early 20th century. People looked to her clinic for alternative medical care, which mainly consisted of fasting as a cure-all.

Despite little formal training and a lack of a medical degree, she was licensed by the state of Washington as a “fasting specialist.” Her methods, while not entirely unique, were extremely unorthodox. Hazzard believed that the root of all disease lay in food—specifically, too much of it. “Appetite is Craving; Hunger is Desire. Craving is never satisfied; but Desire is relieved when Want is supplied,” she wrote in her self-published 1908 book Fasting for the Cure of Disease. The path to true health, Hazzard wrote, was to periodically let the digestive system “rest” through near-total fasts of days or more. During this time, patients consumed only small servings of vegetable broth, their systems “flushed” with daily enemas and vigorous massages that nurses said sometimes sounded more like beatings.

An extended stay at the Institute was only affordable to those who were well-off, and only desirable to those who were desperate to improve their health. But when Claire Williamson died while staying with Hazzard, her childhood nurse came to investigate and found that Claire had only weighed 50 pounds when she died. Furthermore, she’d left her estate to Hazzard. And Claire’s sister Dora was still at the facility. It then came to light that Claire wasn’t the first patient to die under Hazzard’s care. Read the story of the “doctor,” her bigamist husband, the mortuary that may have been in cahoots with them, and the sister held prisoner, at Smithsonian.