The Story of Starvation Heights

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2:03Hey, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh, and Chuck's here, too, and Jerry's here, too, and I'm here, too. That's me, Josh, and this is Stuff You Should Know. The We're All Three Feeling Weird edition. Yeah, yeah, isn't that strange? So, yeah, I said that I was just feeling kind of off today, and you said, me, too, and Jerry said, me, three. Yeah, what does that mean? I don't know. But I mean, that is very, that's remarkable to me that all three of us, I mean, we all have three different personalities. We don't like, you know, we don't live together despite what most people think. Yeah, not anymore.

2:42No. So I don't know what it is. Maybe something's in retrograde in something's house or something like that. That whole thing. Stuff you should know is in retrograde, whatever that means. uh so yeah we'll we'll do our best with this i'll i'll do my best not to break out in tears no i think we'll be okay and uh big thanks to julia for helping us put together this episode on uh one of the quacks of all quacks i feel like we have covered quite a few quacks over the years yeah this one isn't as bad as that one guy that we did though but she's up there for sure i mean I think she still has her supporters like you can still buy her books online yeah but most people who are familiar with her case are like she was a serial killer she just had a strange method of murder yeah of bleeding people of their money yeah for sure and their life force as Toby Hooper might put it that's right so yeah we're talking about a woman named Linda Burfield Perry Hazard There's at least two hyphens in there.

3:51And she was born in the 19th century, but was doing most of her work in the late 19th, early 20th century. And she was a person who was vehemently opposed, like from what I could tell, like very seriously, like this was her personal philosophy against what would be called modern medicine today. But at the time was, you know, just starting out, as we'll see. Yeah, for sure. She was a self-described fasting specialist. She had no medical degree. She did have wealthy patients and I was about to say patrons, but I guess they were patients. and she said she was the only fasting specialist in the world.

4:36You know, this was sort of the time of the sanitarium, sanatorium world where you could go off and practice some very questionable methods of healing people. Yeah, like the Kellogg brothers in Battle Creek. Yeah, exactly. Because, you know, we had not in the United States yet set up sort of rules around the medical world at this point. No, but it's coming. It's like right around that time. And in part because of so much quackery that was going on. The same time, a lot of this stuff is what you would call alternative medicine today or just sensible stuff. Like the Kellogg brothers had a bunch of weird stuff and their whole jam was fairly weird.

5:20But if you boiled everything down to what they were saying, a lot of it was like diet and exercise, which is just great advice today as far as health is concerned. The problem is, is like some people took this to terrible extremes. Other people were peddling just like outright fake and dangerous medicines. Like there were, there were the outliers were so bad that they were ruining it for everybody who actually had some legitimate stuff that they were doing. And Linda Hazard was an outlier. Although, again, I think she was a true believer in herself and her cure. Yeah, for sure. But, you know, to be clear, she was not serving up bowls of granula.

6:02She was killing people. Like, I think 15 patients starved to death under her watch. Yes. And she would eventually go to trial for the murder of one. Yeah, it was a sensation in 1912. A real sensation. Let's talk about Linda Burfield Perry Hazard, who we're just going to call Linda Hazard from here on out. But she was born Linda Burfield in Minnesota in 1867, as most people in 1867 were born. What, rurally? Rurally, and a lot of them in Minnesota. I think something like 98 % of births in 1867 took place in Minnesota. That's incredible. She actually had an experience. she said she wrote again a bunch of books 11 by my count oh wow um and so she said according to herself that she had been um she had run into modern medicine as a child and this doctor had given her some pills blue mass pills that are essentially mercury pills and um they were like fairly regularly used at the time but they did not sit very well with her no it made her really sick Like this, again, this is the day when they would, you know, a doctor would say like, here, take this thing because it'll cure basically anything you have.

7:21And that's always the red flag, even if it's not pure snake oil. Yes. The sort of cure all thing. Yeah. And it made her really sick, very memorably so, like digestively for the most part. But after that, she was like, I'm done with doctors and I'm going to eventually be my own doctor and be a doctor to other people. She married a guy named Edwin Perry in 1886, had a couple of kids, got divorced. And apparently, I don't know if that led to her divorce when she just sort of went center of left as far as her care goes. Do you think that was it? It's possible. That was the impression I have, too, but I'm not sure.

8:02There's so much just random stuff that people say about her that may or may not be true. There's a lot of surmising. I think it said center of left, too, by the way. Yeah. The thing is, Chuck, is everyone knew what you meant. So that counts as communication. You know, don't be such a prescriptionist. That's right. Left of center. But she married Perry, got divorced and then fell into the care of Dr. Edward Dewey, who was a faster. He preached fasting. He basically said that, you know, every disease that we have comes from habitual eating in excess, basically. Like, you're out eating what your stomach and your gastric juices can handle.

8:42Yeah, that's the sum total of Linda Hazard's whole thing. I mean, she had a three-prong approach, which was intense fasting, enema, enema, enema. I've read that her enemas lasted for hours sometimes. I think that was also the title of your second LP, right? It was. It was my cover songs of William Shatner's cover songs. That's right. Yeah, that's actually an appropriate title for that. Or Lobotomy, Lobotomy, Lobotomy. Yeah. And then the other one was Powerful Massage that I think calling a massage is fairly generous. She would pound on her patients and apparently shout, So eliminate, eliminate, because again, she's trying to get undigested food and poop that's left over out of the body.

9:31And by fasting, you're not introducing more food. You're letting the body rest while getting rid of the food that's been undigested. That's the source of all of your diseases. Yeah. Like you drank the colon cleanse before your first colonoscopy kind of empty. Yes. Yeah. Oh, she would have loved that stuff. Yeah, probably so. She did take a few nursing classes. You know, we have to mention that. I'm not trying to legitimize her or anything, but she did take a few osteopathic nursing classes. She opened a fasting therapy practice in Minneapolis there. Sure. This is when she went by Dr. Linda Burfield Perry, even though she was divorced from Edwin Perry.

10:18And yeah, she said, like, come on in. I'll beat on you. I will I will not let you eat anything like really not at all. us. We'll see. Let's hold on to that little factoid, like how little these people are eating. Right. But she would find love again in 1903 or find something in the way of a swindler named Samuel Hazard, who was a he would go to jail for bigamy because he was already married and I guess did not get divorced and also married Linda Burfield. And so he went to jail for a couple of years. Yeah. And then got out of jail. And they're like, all right, we're good to go. Let's go to Seattle.

10:52Yeah. And that's where her practice really started. The two of them together, like, really kind of established this, well, they called it Wilderness Heights. And it was supposed to be like a sanitarium or retreat where you went and got this fasting cure. And it's like you said, you have to be wary of cures that cure everything. And that was very much the case with her. she apparently was saying like once you go through the fasting cure and you get all this crowd out you're set like everything from you can go have a kid and have no pain during childbirth you're not going to get toothaches anymore if you're an alcoholic you won't be an alcoholic anymore if you're depressed no more depression like it's it's a cure all from from her stance So that's how she basically advertised it, I guess.

11:46Yeah. So she's the main player here. Samuel, her husband, is a little bit in the background, but he'll pop up here and there when it comes to the financials. And then our other couple of players are Claire and Dora Williamson. They were English. They were daughters of an English military person. Evelyn Dorothy, her name was Dora. She went by Dora Williamson. She was born in India in 1873. And then her sister, Enid Lillian Claire Williamson, was born in London in 1877. And they were basically from teenagers on had no parents. I think their father died after Claire was born and then their mom died about 16 years later.

12:26So they were, you know, they were orphaned teens who were really, really rich and really, really tight, very close with one another. Yeah. And seemed to be like adventurous, not in a hurry to get married, which is what you would think for the time period to get married right away. They kind of like to travel the world and go on adventures and not follow the prescribed method. Yeah. They were independent women of the 90s, the 1890s. That's right. So they also, though, they weren't entirely orphaned. I mean, as far as like biological parents maybe are concerned, but they had a governess who took care of them as well.

13:04And I think kind of was part of their life long before their mother died. But I have the impression that she was like an additional mom or an additional grandmother or something to them. Right. I think that's how the Richies do it. Yeah, for sure. So just keep that in mind that these women are slightly outside of the norm. They have no problem with being slightly outside of the norm. And they are very interesting and interested people. They're very curious. And one of the things that they are focused on is natural health. Like they're just super into that kind of thing. And by the time they cross paths with Linda Hazard, they've done all sorts of stuff.

13:48Like any kind of cure you can think of. They've traveled to some sanitarium or sanatorium. They've traveled to some health clinic and they've just done this whole thing. It's like basically what they were interested in. Yeah, for sure. And, you know, they did some kind of brave things at the time for the time period. They they were like, I don't want to wear corsets anymore. They're super uncomfortable. And I think they're probably bad for us. Sure. So they didn't wear corsets anymore. They gave up meat. Eating meat was, or being vegetarian, I guess, at the very least, was a pretty weird thing back then.

14:21So they were definitely following their own path. And then in 1910, they were in their 30s at this point. They were in the beautiful Empress Hotel in Victoria, British Columbia. You sounded like you're an announcer for the prices, right? It looks really nice. I mean, it's still around from what I can tell. At least the pictures look modern. Yeah, it's a Fairmont now. Oh, of course it is. And I didn't mean that snarkily. Like, there are some very nice Fairmonts. Sure. I'm glad you said that because they're a huge sponsor of Stuff You Should Know. No, they're not, are they? I don't think so. It's like, why am I not getting any free juice then?

14:57Right. So at the time, it was like the nicest hotel in North America. And they saw an ad in the local paper from Dr. Hazard. And I guess we can call her a doctor, but I'm mentally using scare quotes. And they wrote her a letter and said, hey, we're two sisters. We'd like to visit Wilderness Heights and we're coming to Seattle. Nice. I think that's a great place to leave off for an ab break. Coming to Seattle? What could be better? Not much, man. All right. We'll be right back.

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18:14So before we get back to Claire and Dora and Linda Hazard, we should probably make like a little side note here that like, although Linda Hazard's stuff was bizarre, like this, the extreme she took it to, like alternative medicine was still very much a thing. We did that whole episode on the Flexner Report, which basically said from now on in the United States and Europe, it's just like medical science. That's it. Anything outside of that is cuckoo quackery and should be persecuted and run out of town on a rail, essentially. And so this was the time when you could still be an alternative medicine practitioner.

18:58You could still be an out-and-out quack. Yeah. And there was no law against that yet. And this was definitely the gray area that Linda Hazard fell in. Yeah. And I think her case, and especially the case with these two sisters in particular, like it wasn't the leading reason, but it was definitely evidence as they move forward with stuff like the Flexner Report of like changes is needed. Their fasting had been around for a long, long time. Obviously, people fasted in the Bible. People fasted in ancient Greece. I think Hippocrates and Pythagoras both were into fasting. So that was not a new thing.

19:42fasting is still a thing and detoxes and cleanses. And, you know, we've done our fair share of podcasting on that kind of stuff. So none of this is new or old. No, we did one on corsets, too. I just remembered. That's right. Yeah. One of the other things that is definitely old about this is that whole idea of undigested food being the source of all disease. That's Ayurvedic in nature, too. Ancient Asian Indian medical practice basically says if you have undigested food or build a buildup of poop or whatever in your system, all disease emanates from that. So even Dr. Edward Dewey was not exactly like groundbreaking with that idea.

20:27Yeah. And people are like, it all comes from the poop. And they're like, have you smelled this stuff? There's no way that's good. It's gyros. What if poop, not, you know, I guess we're going there. I'm going there. Okay. What if poop didn't smell like that at all? And I'm not saying, oh, what if it smelled like, you know, something great? Like, what if it just literally had no odor and that was it? Like, would the world be a really a better place? Hmm. I say yes. Yeah, I guess. Sure. I guess I don't smell enough poop in any given day that it really ruins the world for me. Well, I mean, you have your outhouse.

21:07Sure, but I steer clear of it. Yeah. I was just curious at like the divorce rate, like what all would change? Airports? Airport happiness? Okay. Yes. Airports. That's a really good point right there. Yeah. That's the worst. Yeah. It really is really bad. Like that's a good reason not to fly before like 10 a.m. Like it's one thing to be married to somebody, but you don't want to smell the poop of 12 strangers. No. No, you don't. That's why no one should poop in public bathrooms. They shouldn't even have toilets in there. All urinals all the time. Yeah. They should have urinals and signs that say, hold it.

21:45Right. Just hold it. Have a poop, go to jail. All right. So, sorry to get to go off on a tangent there about poop. I'll just kind of, I've never done that particular thought experiment. Okay. Well, I liked it. All right. So, she had her big, big book. I mean, she had 11 of them. But I feel like the one as far as this goes, this most relevant is the one from 1908. It's called Fasting for the Cure of Disease. And that's where she laid out, you know, the program, which is just those three things, really. You know, fast to get beaten on and get those, as Josh says, enema, enema, enema. And the first person to die from this treatment, she wrote the book after, six years after this, which is pretty disturbing.

22:31But in 1902, at her Minneapolis practice, there was a woman who was partially paralyzed. And very sadly, she died on day 37 of a 40-day fast. And Linda Hazard, as the doctor, said, cause of death, paralysis. Yeah, that would be a recurring theme, as we'll see. Right. Because she also, she was declaring the cause of death for her patients as a physician, even though she wasn't really a physician. and I guess still even at this time under circumstances like this the local coroner would still take a look at any dead body saw the body of this woman Gertrude Young and was like I don't know that this was paralysis that did this because she's pretty emaciated let's perform an autopsy and see what happens looked inside of poor Gertrude Young and said yep she died of starvation just as I suspected that's right And as we'll see later, Linda Hazard didn't think that was a viable way of dying.

23:35She's basically like, you can't starve someone to death. It's not possible. Right. So she's wrong about that. But she did not have a medical license, so she could not be brought up on charges or anything. She was telling this woman to fast, and the woman was fasting. She didn't have her locked up and chained to a bed or anything like that. She was just following the advice of the wrong person. Exactly. And yeah, Linda Hazard could just like shrug and be like, you know, what are you going to do? Yeah. This was like years after when she and her husband Samuel moved to Seattle and started their practice together.

24:15So that's not why she moved. This was just the first body in her long body count, essentially. Yeah. I mean, bodies, you know, people started dying at her practice in Washington as well. And there in Washington at the time, you could be grandfathered in as far as what kind of alternative medicine you were practicing. So she was kind of all good there. In 1907 is when she started treating patients in Washington. And, you know, right away, again, this wasn't like the weirdest stuff at the time. So she had some of the elite of Washington, like state legislators coming there. it wasn't like, oh, that weird lady in the woods that's killing people.

24:58It was sort of the fashion of the day in some ways. Yeah. Also, there was a real deference to her from the local population, which were typically Swedish immigrants who were not necessarily formally educated. They didn't have a lot of money. So this was like she made a lot of money, we should say, multiple times throughout her career. Um, so she was wealthy. She had a lot of land. Uh, she was a doctor. So she said she was much more highly educated than anyone else in the area that they knew. So, um, she, she, like she was popular and people just kind of respected her in this area too. So in addition to these wealthy and kind of elite, you know, alternative medicine file patrons and, and customers, just the local people who had nothing to do with this still thought fairly highly of her too.

25:56Yeah, for sure. Even though people were dying, I think by the time the Williamson sisters arrived in 1911, seven patients had died under her care, six from starvation, or what looked to be starvation. And what was also learned was, like you said, she performed all the autopsies herself. and it was also revealed that the estates of these people were left to the sanatorium. So she was also taking their money, even though it was, you know, from the outside under the guise of like they believed in her so much, they wanted her practice to continue. Yes, exactly. And this is where it really becomes murdery, you know?

26:37Yeah, like super nefarious. Something else that was gross that I found was, so Wilderness Heights was like a few, like a handful of primitive cabins and then her cottage. And her cottage still stood until like 2014, 2015. Oh, wow. Yeah. And you could go into her cottage and it was still, there were still furnishings in it and including her bathtub. And the bathtub of her cottage is where she was performing her autopsies. Oh, geez. So that to me kind of like really gets across like this is not like a super polished outfit. You know what I mean? Yeah, yeah, for sure. And I think that's important to keep in mind, too.

27:17She basically built some rough-hewn cabins in the woods in Washington and called this like her sanitarium. Yeah, and this is, by the way, in Alala Woods, Washington. Yes, so close to Walla Walla. So close. so uh claire and dora get there in february of 1911 and she was like hey we're not gonna stay here in wilderness heights uh i'm not sure why she did this i have a feeling that she knew that she had some big fish on the line yeah that's what i'm too so she took them to seattle instead and she she basically lied to him and said that the alala woods um retreat wasn't completed yet even though i think it clearly was right and so they put they put them up in some apartments in downtown Seattle, started their fasting treatment and the vigorous massage, and they were eating two cups of vegetable broth.

28:12Sounds like basically canned tomato juice a day. I also saw, I think Dora later said that they were made from asparagus tips, spinach, and lettuce, a broth made from that. Yeah, veggie broth. Yeah, so not anything that you could possibly even remotely get full off of. Yeah. Like you said, I think a cup twice a day. Yeah. That's just, yeah. So you're going to lose weight very quickly. And this was like 40 plus days of fasting that Hazard was prescribing to her patients. Right. And so I think the, both of the Williamson sisters made it to 50 days before they were transferred to Wilderness Heights.