Starvation Heights: Dr. Linda Hazzard and the Fasting Cure That Killed Her Patients
The locals in and around Olalla, Washington, had a name for the property. They called it Starvation Heights. The people they occasionally encountered near it, stumbling along the dirt roads toward town, were skeletal, sometimes barely coherent, sometimes begging for food from strangers. These were the patients of Dr. Linda Burfield Hazzard, who had built a sanitarium in the Pacific Northwest woods on the premise that nearly every disease known to medicine could be cured by starvation.
Hazzard did not hold a medical degree. She held a licence as a “fasting specialist,” a credential that existed under a loophole in Washington State’s medical practice laws at the time. She had written a book on fasting therapy called “Fasting for the Cure of Disease,” published in 1908, which provided a theoretical basis for her practice and attracted patients from as far away as England and Australia. She charged substantial fees. She expected substantial compliance. She controlled her patients’ communication with the outside world. And she watched them die, over months, while assisting in the process of dying by keeping them on regimens of near-total starvation that guaranteed the outcome.
At least fifteen patients died at her sanitarium or under her care. The true number is likely higher. She was convicted of manslaughter in 1912. She served less than two years. She reopened and continued practicing for decades.
The Treatment
Hazzard’s fasting cure was simple in its prescription and catastrophic in its effects. Patients were placed on a diet that typically consisted of small quantities of tomato broth and asparagus juice, consumed in measured amounts at regulated intervals. Solid food was eliminated entirely for extended periods, sometimes weeks or months. Daily enemas were administered, which Hazzard performed personally. And the third component of her treatment was something she called massage, but which witnesses described as violent and prolonged pounding of the patient’s abdomen and flanks, a process that combined with the starvation to accelerate the physical deterioration of patients who were already weakening.
Patients were not free to leave easily. Many had signed over financial control to Hazzard as part of the treatment arrangement, a step she encouraged as part of ensuring that patients would receive the prolonged treatment they supposedly needed without interruption. Communication with family members was filtered through Hazzard, who in some cases intercepted letters and sent reassuring updates to worried relatives while the patients she was describing as improving were continuing to decline. Some patients were in states of such severe mental confusion, produced by starvation and associated electrolyte derangement, that they could not coherently object to or seek to escape from their circumstances.
The patients who arrived at Starvation Heights were, typically, not dying when they came. They had chronic conditions: digestive complaints, neurasthenia, general debility, the vague collection of complaints that late Victorian and Edwardian medicine grouped under headings that reflected a belief in the cleansing power of deprivation. Some had been referred by physicians. Some had read Hazzard’s book and arrived in the conviction that its promises were real. They paid for the privilege of starving to death.
Claire Williamson and the Case That Ended Hazzard’s First Career
Claire Williamson and her sister Dorothea were English women of independent means who came to Hazzard’s sanitarium in 1911. Claire was unwell in the general, undefined way that brought many patients to Starvation Heights. She and Dorothea arrived from England and were placed on the fasting programme. Within weeks, their conditions were deteriorating markedly.
Dorothea survived because her family connections eventually produced a rescue. John Herbert, a British vice consul, was contacted by the family’s solicitor and travelled to Olalla to assess the sisters’ situation. He found Dorothea in an extremely weakened state, but still alive and capable of being removed from the sanitarium. He arranged for her departure.
Claire was not removable. She was by then too weak, too confused, and too far into the starvation process to be transported. She died on August 18, 1911. A coroner examining her body estimated that she had weighed approximately 50 pounds at death, down from a weight on arrival that had been within normal range. She was 40 years old. The death certificate Hazzard signed listed the cause of death as cirrhosis of the stomach.
The true cause was starvation, and the people who had observed Claire’s deterioration and the conditions at the sanitarium were not willing to let that fact pass without consequence. John Herbert filed a complaint with Kitsap County authorities. Hazzard was arrested in August 1911 on charges of manslaughter.
The Trial and the Conviction
The trial of Linda Hazzard ran from November 1911 to February 1912. Witnesses described the conditions at the sanitarium in detail: the patients’ physical states, the dietary regime, the massages, the enemas, the interception of correspondence. Dorothea Williamson testified about what she had observed. The nursing attendants who had worked at Starvation Heights described what they had seen.
The prosecution’s case turned on a question that sounds simple but was, in the medical jurisprudence of 1911, genuinely contested: was starvation a legitimate medical treatment, and if it caused death, was that death a foreseeable consequence of the practitioner’s deliberate conduct? Hazzard’s defence argued that she was a licensed practitioner applying a treatment that was within the scope of her licence, and that Claire Williamson had died from the underlying condition that had brought her to Hazzard rather than from the treatment itself.
The jury did not accept this defence. Hazzard was convicted of manslaughter in the second degree and sentenced to a prison term of between two and twenty years at the Washington State Penitentiary in Walla Walla. She began serving the sentence in 1912.
She was pardoned by Governor Ernest Lister in 1915, after approximately two years, having served a fraction of the maximum sentence available. The basis for the pardon has not been fully documented, though Hazzard and her husband had considerable social connections in Washington State. The pardon did not end her medical practice.
What Happened After
Following her release, Hazzard attempted to continue her fasting practice in Washington but faced sufficient public opposition to make that difficult. She and her husband moved to New Zealand, where she attempted to establish a fasting sanitarium. New Zealand authorities, having received reports of her Washington conviction, encouraged her to leave. She eventually returned to Washington State.
Back in Olalla, she rebuilt her sanitarium and continued to practise, operating under her own name and advertising the fasting cure to patients who, in some cases, had no knowledge of her manslaughter conviction. The rebuilt sanitarium operated until 1935, when it burned down. Hazzard continued to practise from other locations until her health declined.
She died in 1938. Some accounts say she died while attempting to apply her own fasting cure to herself in response to illness. Whether this is accurate or apocryphal, it has the quality of a symmetry that her story perhaps demanded.
The Legal Framework and the Limits of Licensing
The Hazzard case illustrates a problem that recurs throughout the history of medical regulation: the gap between the existence of a licence and the adequacy of the regulation it represents. Hazzard held a genuine licence, issued by the state of Washington under its medical practice laws. That licence described her as a “fasting specialist,” a category that existed because the legislature had not specifically prohibited it and had not established meaningful oversight of it.
In this sense, the question of her conduct was not primarily a question of medical malpractice in the modern understanding of the term: she was not a physician who had deviated from an established standard of care. She was a practitioner whose entire practice was itself the deviation from any acceptable care standard, operating under a licence that had been granted without any clinical framework for evaluating whether starvation therapy was appropriate for the patients to whom it was applied. The manslaughter charge, rather than a professional misconduct or regulatory action, was the instrument that the law ultimately applied to her conduct.
The case contributed to subsequent reforms in Washington State’s medical licensing laws, tightening the standards under which non-physician practitioners could claim therapeutic authority. But it also demonstrated the limits of those reforms: Hazzard was pardoned, resumed practice, and operated for another two decades without being held to further account for the deaths that continued to occur in her care.
TL;DR: Key Facts, Legal Concepts, and Why This Case Matters
Who was Linda Hazzard?
Linda Burfield Hazzard (1867-1938) was a Washington State practitioner who held a licence as a “fasting specialist” under a loophole in the state’s medical practice laws. She had no medical degree. She operated a sanitarium near Olalla, Washington, where she treated patients with near-total starvation, daily enemas, and vigorous “massage.” At least fifteen patients died under her care. She was convicted of manslaughter in 1912, pardoned after approximately two years, and continued to practise for decades.
What was her treatment and why was it dangerous?
Hazzard’s treatment consisted primarily of a near-starvation diet of small amounts of tomato broth and asparagus juice, combined with daily enemas and physical manipulation she described as massage. The physiological consequences of extended fasting of this severity include severe malnutrition, electrolyte derangement (dangerously low sodium, potassium, and other electrolytes), loss of muscle mass including cardiac muscle, immune suppression, and eventual organ failure. Death from extended starvation is predictable and prolonged. The patients who died under Hazzard’s care were not dying from their presenting conditions: they were dying from her treatment.
How did she maintain control over her patients?
Patients were often encouraged to sign over financial control to Hazzard as a condition of treatment. Communication with family members was managed through Hazzard, who in some cases intercepted or filtered correspondence and provided reassuring updates that did not reflect the patients’ actual deterioration. As patients weakened and became cognitively impaired from starvation-related electrolyte imbalances, their ability to seek help or leave the sanitarium diminished. The combination of financial dependence, physical weakness, and informational isolation gave Hazzard considerable control over patients who had initially sought her out voluntarily.
Was this a malpractice case or a criminal case?
Hazzard was not a licensed physician and therefore did not owe her patients the standard of care imposed on physicians by the law of medical negligence. The charge brought against her was manslaughter, reflecting the criminal law’s assessment that her deliberate conduct had caused a foreseeable death. This is an important distinction: the civil remedy of medical malpractice was not fully available to victims because Hazzard was not practising conventional medicine. The criminal law, through its concept of manslaughter (a death caused by unlawful or grossly negligent conduct), was the applicable instrument. Her case illustrates how the law struggles with practitioners who operate in the grey zones between licensed medicine and outright fraud.
Why was she pardoned and allowed to continue practicing?
The specific reasons for Governor Lister’s 1915 pardon of Hazzard are not fully documented. She served approximately two years of a possible twenty-year sentence before being released. The pardon did not restrict her from practising. Washington State’s licensing regime at the time did not automatically revoke a fasting specialist’s licence upon a manslaughter conviction, and the regulatory environment for alternative practitioners was weak enough to allow her to resume and continue for decades. Her case is studied as an example of how regulatory systems can fail to protect the public even after a criminal conviction establishes that the practitioner’s methods are lethal.
Where can I learn more?
Gregg Olsen’s 1997 book “Starvation Heights” is the primary narrative account of Linda Hazzard’s story, drawing on trial transcripts, contemporary newspaper accounts, and archival records. Olsen conducted extensive original research into the Williamson family’s experience and the Kitsap County trial. The book remains the definitive account of the case.
