Claire’s body, embalmed and on display at the Butterworth mortuary near Pike Place Market, looked like it belonged to another person-the hands, facial shape, and color of the hair all looked wrong to her. Margaret Conway wasn’t trained as a doctor, but she knew something was amiss. To hear the Hazzards tell it, Claire had been much too far gone for the “beautiful treatment” to save her. Hazzard later explained it, the culprit was a course of drugs administered to Claire in childhood, which had shrunk her internal organs and caused cirrhosis of the liver. Aboard the bus to their hotel, Samuel delivered some startling news: Claire was dead. Hazzard’s husband Samuel Hazzard (a former Army lieutenant who served jail time for bigamy after marrying Linda) met Margaret in Vancouver. It contained only a few words, but seemed so nonsensical the nurse bought a ticket on a boat to the Pacific Northwest to check up on them.ĭr. The only clue something was amiss came in a mysterious cable to their childhood nurse, Margaret Conway, who was then visiting family in Australia. But the sisters were used to family disapproving of their health quests, and told no one where they were going. Family members would have been worried too, if any of them had known what was going on. They were given hours-long enemas in the bathtub, which was covered with canvas supports when the girls started to faint during their treatment.īy the time the Williamsons were transferred to the Hazzard home in Olalla two months later, they weighed about 70 pounds, according to one worried neighbor. Instead, Hazzard set them up in apartment on Seattle’s Capitol Hill, where she began feeding them a broth made from canned tomatoes. But when the women reached Seattle in February 1911 after signing up for treatment, they were told the sanitarium in Olalla wasn’t quite ready. They dreamed of horses grazing the fields, and vegetable broths made with produce fresh from nearby farms. The institute’s countryside setting appealed to the sisters almost as much as the purported medical benefits of Hazzard’s regimen. Almost as soon as they learned of Hazzard’s Institute of Natural Therapeutics in Olalla, they became determined to undergo what Claire called Hazzard’s “most beautiful treatment.” The sisters were great believers in what we might today call “alternative medicine,” and had already given up both meat and corsets in an attempt to improve their health. Though not seriously ill, the pair felt they were suffering from a variety of minor ailments: Dorothea complained of swollen glands and rheumatic pains, while Claire had been told she had a dropped uterus. But the best-remembered of Hazzard’s patients are a pair of British sisters named Claire and Dorothea (known as Dora) Williamson, the orphaned daughters of a well-to-do English army officer.Īs Olalla-based author Gregg Olsen explains in his book Starvation Heights (named after the locals’ term for Hazzard’s institute), the sisters first saw an ad for Hazzard’s book in a newspaper while staying at the lush Empress Hotel in Victoria, British Columbia. Haglund left behind a three-year-old son, Ivar, who would later go on to open the successful Seattle-based seafood restaurant chain that bears his name. One was Daisey Maud Haglund, a Norwegian immigrant who died in 1908 after fasting for 50 days under Hazzard’s care. 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.ĭespite the harsh methods, Hazzard attracted her fair share of patients. The path to true health, Hazzard wrote, was to periodically let the digestive system “rest” through near-total fasts of days or more. 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. Hazzard believed that the root of all disease lay in food-specifically, too much of it. 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.
#SANITARIUM BOOK TRIAL#
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.Īt the center of the trial was a woman with a formidable presence and a memorable name: Dr. 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.
0 kommentar(er)
