The History Room
The Doctor Who Starved Her Patients to Death
The Doctor Who Starved Her Patients to Death - Linda Hazzard killed as many as a dozen people in the early 20th century, and they paid willingly for it.
Today the little town of Olalla, a ferry’s ride across Puget Sound from Seattle, is a mostly forgotten place, the handful of dilapidated buildings a testament to the hardscrabble farmers, loggers and fisherman who once tried to make a living among the blackberry vines and Douglas firs. But in the 1910s, Olalla was briefly on the front page of international newspapers for a murder trial the likes of which the region has never seen before or since.
At the center of the trial was a woman with a formidable presence and a memorable name: Dr. Linda Hazzard. 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.
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https://getpocket.com/explore/item/t...=pocket-newtab
https://www.sceneofthecrimepodcast.c...linda-hazzard/
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Originally Posted by Dr. Who
