Alexander Henderson had heard some strange things in his day as a doctor. He liked solving the body's mysteries. But what or who waited for him in Tutbury, a small village in Staffordshire, was something or someone that even he couldn't quite understand. His patient that day was a local resident by the name of Anne Moore, who claimed to have not eaten since eighteen oh seven, the year, by the way, was now eighteen twelve. Anne had long ago ceased to just be a local oddity. Now she was
a global superstar. She had become famous for claiming to survive without food. There was now even a wax replica of her across the ocean in a Boston museum. But it wasn't Anne that called for Alexander's counsel that day. She actually didn't need a thing. Rather, he was going to surprise her. This was an ambush, and Alexander wanted to prove her grift once and for all. When he and his traveling companion arrived at her home, they found
her in bed. She was seemingly unperturbed by their sudden appearance, and for someone who supposedly hadn't eaten in years, her body told an interesting story. Her lower half did indeed look a bit withered, but she overall looked healthy. But she was fifty years old and claimed to have had no food for five years and no drink for four of those. And she told them that she hadn't defecated
in five years nor urinated in three. However, Alexander's own sense told him otherwise, with the odor of soiled bedclothes hanging heavy in the room. Even though Alexander didn't believe Anne's claims, her community certainly did. They wanted to. You see, she stood for something much larger than herself, and she wasn't the only girl or woman to take up this
starvation path. For centuries, the ability to survive without nourishment had been tied to morality and divinity, and now Anne Moore would become part of a long line of girls and women who would use as a public spectacle. Often, these women, who had later become known as the Fasting Girls, came from rural backgrounds or from poor and working class families. From humble beginnings, they found ways to usurp their social order.
Suddenly people wanted to pay attention to them, and when word of their strange feats spread, People would come to see them, and often for a price. Molly Franchier, a woman from Brooklyn, New York, spoke in prophecies and accepted donations. Others such as Sarah Jacob, the Welsh fasting Girl, Leonora Eaton of New Jersey, and Josephine Marie Bedard, claimed to have been granted a variety of abilities and powers because
of their abstinence from food. The cultural fascination with them inspired their courting by P. T. Barnum and his contemporaries for dime museums and sideshows. They were a hot commodity. Those fasting girls and Alexander saw them as nothing more than a hoax. After examining Anne, Alexander deduced that it was likely that she had fasted just over two weeks.
He deemed that her five year fast that she claimed to have undertaken would have actually killed her, and for her parts, did all that she could to avoid close and protracted scrutiny of any kind, and, according to Alexander's published account, those who supported her had a vested interest in maintaining her ruse. Her station in life had certainly improved. She had gone from impoverished to comfortable, affording an existence funded by her own exhibition. But this wasn't to last.
For curious outsiders, the desire to prove or disprove her claims became insatiable. In the spring of eighteen thirteen, it was decided that a local clergyman would supervise her around the clock. He would sit at her bedside, maintaining vigil She was reluctant to be a part of any such watch, but did against her better judgment. The study began on April twenty first. By the thirtieth Anne was emaciated and feverish, causing her daughter to call it off, and died a
few months later at the age of fifty three. There is much to be said about the fasting girls and why they did what they did. In fact, although the history of fasting is inextricably linked to morality and piety, there's a shadowy side there as well, and Moore was nowhere near the first to take a crack at a career in fasting for personal gain, and as usual, she wouldn't be the last. I'm Aaron Manky and welcome to bedside Manners. Before Primetime TV gave us the WWE and WWF.
We had the Gladiators. They were a curious class in Roman society, admired, revered, and somewhat's on the fringe, bound by an oath to submit to death, who just happened to also provide top notch entertainment. They were a spectacle unto themselves, selling tickets to shows that helped the masses pass the sweltering ro afternoons. It's here that we once again find the physician Galen, who by now you've already
heard a lot about in this season. By around one sixty a d. Galen had become the resident physician to the Gladiators at the Temple of Peragammon. He was the guy behind the scenes, rubbing their shoulders, stitching their skin, and cleaning up their spilled blood. Galen would tend to his gladiators between shows, prepping them to get back out in the ring, so to speak, for the cheering crowds.
The scope of his actual work was pretty broad. He was a doctor, an athletic trainer, a physical therapist, and a dietician all rolled into one. He was particularly interested in experimenting with diet for strength building and healing, which he spoke at length about these ideas in his writing. He saw food as a tool, pretty straightforward healing modality for the body and the spirit. These ideas, though, were inherited from another mind that we've heard about in this series,
the mind of Hippocrates. Years before, he had written that everyone has a physician side of him or her. We just have to help it in its work. Our food should be our medicine. Our medicine should be our food. Leaning on his idea of the four humors the balance of four bodily fluids that controlled the health of our systems, Galen sought balance through combining and eating what he thought
to be opposites. Take his treatment for indigestion, for example, it was believed that this was a symptom of too much cold, wet flegm, so a hot, dry treatment should be taken. A common prescription might be wine to dry you out, and black pepper to bring the heat. He wrote three books on the idea, all divided into themes. The first volume spoke largely of grains, the second to
fruits and vegetables, and the third of animal products. Think of these as therapeutic texts, attempting to outline the utility of each food and devising ways to use them to heal people. He didn't believe in a one size fits all diet and believe that every individual should take into consideration what fits them best. Later writers picked up where Galen left off. Scrimonious Largess, who was writing in the first century a d thought that diet should be the
first line of defense in medical care. Plutarch also believed that doctors did their best work when prescribing diets and sleep as opposed to taking more drastic measures. Prevention through a good diet was more ideal than needing to seek a cure once you got sick, especially when cures those days looked a lot like cutting, bleeding and burning the body. And alongside thoughts on how we should be eating, there
were many coexisting belief systems that spoke of how we shouldn't. Buddhism, Christianity, Jainism, Hinduism, Islam, Judaism, and Taoism ancient religions, all of them elevate fasting, even if for different reasons. Fasting is often understood to be a means of humility and sacrifice, or of clarity and awareness, a physical self denial for the purpose of spiritual satisfaction.
The Greeks, for example, believe that demons had the ability to enter into the mouth while we ate, and later on Puritan Cotton Mather recommended fasting to all of those who wanted to stop the witchcraft hysteria that had besieged Salem, Massachusetts. Together, all of these ideas around eating and not eating have created something of a monstrous tangled web in our collective belief systems of what eating even means. There are entire
fields of study dedicated to understanding such things. For us today, though, we're going to begin by just pulling at some of these freight ends of fasting this ancient and complicated tool. Around the turn of the twentieth century, a perfect storm of eating had landed on the shores of the United States. Mass immigration had arrived and with it a slew of new cultures and their food ways. Industrialization too, was taking hold.
To feed all of these mouths, mass produced food was often cut with toxic additives to make it go further, to last longer, and to be more profitable. The edible landscape of America was changing and quickly. At that far from healing, was actively making people physically sick. And it makes sense then that for folks of a certain elevated class, ideas around self control and food would begin to blur.
Starvation due to poverty was deadly, but exercising fasting with the safety net of abundance, even among the secular folks, began to take on a righteous air. Time was ripe to look once again towards the past for answers to current woes. The marketing of dietary cures began in earnest, some in good faith and with advice that we still abide by today. Others, though, had no intent to cure. Instead, they aimed to kill. Linda had no medical degree, but she had a can opener, and she had a vision.
You could say that her life was set on this course. When she was a young child in Minnesota. Each year, a traveling doctor would visit her family's home, Her father hopeful that the man had the tools to ward off
any potential illnesses. That one fateful visit, though she and her seven siblings were given mercury pills, tiny and blue and undeniably potent, she was effectively poisoned by the very person who said that he would keep her healthy, and it shouldn't surprise you to hear that this treatment made Linda very, very sick, with frequent bouts of vomiting and diarrhea. Unable to take the hint, the doctor prescribed more of the same pills for Linda's advancing illness, and she would
stay sick for years as a result. This set her off on a quest for her own healing. As a young woman, she decided to study osteopathy, thinking that she would become a nurse, and soon became a disciple of doctor Edward Hooker Dewey, an ardent practitioner and promoter of fasting. Linda decided that this would be her purpose and her mission. She was going to become the world's leaving authority on fasting, the likes of which no one had ever seen before.
She moved to Minneapolis in nineteen oh three and set up shop, leaving behind a husband and children to fend for them. She was of a single mind now and couldn't let anyone stand in her way. She figured that men were allowed to trailblaze, so why shouldn't she be allowed to do the same. Linda believed that system in purification was the root of all sickness, caused by overeating.
Her approach was a pragmatic and brutal one, relying on patients only consuming thin broths made of strained canned tomatoes and asparagus. Installing patients under her watchful eye, she would administer daily enemas that sometimes lasted for hours. She also prescribed daily therapeutic massages, in which patients would be pummeled in the stomach and forehead as Linda commanded them to eliminate. Her gumption proved to be a selling point, and curious
seekers found their way to her doorstep. But it didn't take long for her practice to take on something that fell short of a shine. In fact, she began to gain a deadly reputation. Clients associated with her began to wither, and some began to die. But of course she couldn't be blamed for this. They were free agents, after all, bound by nothing more than a shared interest in holistic healing and health. The most human thing, after all, is
to die, and sometimes that's just what the sick did right. This, of course, wasn't a great look for Linda. She had taken a lover named Sam, and upon his release from prison in nineteen oh seven, they both skipped down and settled in Seattle. Even still, her reputation preceded her. The papers wrote about this mysterious fasting doctor who had come to town her wild and boisterous claims, and speculated about her checkered past. But in a stroke of luck, Linda
inherited a kind of legitimacy when she arrived. You see, the city had recently grandfathered in and granted legality to current holistic healthcare practitioners under a new law that was attempting to legitimize medical practices where she wasn't ever licensed before, she now in a way was, and her attitude had it changed since Minnesota. It was convenient for Linda to be able to blame deceased patient for their own passing.
She argued that the ones who died failed to heed her advice completely, claiming that they were negligent and disregarded her expertise. Authorities couldn't quite figure out how to intervene, or if they even needed to. She continued to get bad press, but her followers remained faithful. She was a polarizing character, this Linda Hazard. In nineteen ten, Linda treated
l E. Radar, a locally famous politician. She installed him in a Seattle hotel, and no amount of coercing by his family could convince him to forego Linda Hazard's fasting cure. This would be a fatal mistake. He died within a month, but not before bequeathing Linda property. A short boat ride off the coast of the city, where she decided that she would once and for all have her own fasting empire, away from the prying eyes of those who had it
out for her. Wilderness Heights she would call it, but it would become known by another name, Starvation Heights, and few would make it out alive. Claire and Dorothea Williamson had come upon a marvelous idea. They had installed themselves in the Empress Hotel in Victoria, British Columbia, to take another one of their resting cures. They were young, beautiful, rich, and likely a little bored. They had lost their parents at a young age, who left them an immense fortune
and undeniable trauma. What's true here is that the two women's pain has long been debated, scrutinized, and doubted. According to one of their own relatives, Claire and Dorothea are ill because they can afford to be. They traveled the world with their jam packed steamer trunks filled with fineries most could only dream of. But all of this money couldn't buy them happiness, and it couldn't buy them health. One fall morning in nineteen ten, they eyed a newspaper
advertisement for the Hazard Institute for Natural the Therapeutics. Claire responded immediately, writing up a laundry list of diagnoses from previous doctors, dropped uterus inflamed ovaries, bad knees, and informed Linda of their intention to come. Linda's Wilderness Heights Sanitarium was still under construction and would be through the winter. However, she quickly agreed to take them on his clients, as long as they were willing to temporarily be installed in
a local Seattle hotel for the time being. The sisters said nothing of this to their friends and surviving family members. They didn't need any extra opinions. They knew what was best for themselves, so Dorothea and Claire consented to treatment, then arrived in Seattle on February twenty sixth of nineteen eleven. For the first time in their lives. They were separated and housed in different departments. Linda insisted that this was necessary for their own rest and well being, and the
sisters obliged. The treatment began, and the women were hopeful. What they couldn't have known was that they were part of Linda's larger plan. Off the coast of Seattle, in the community of Olala, Wilderness Heights was beginning operations, and even though it was newly minted, it had gathered quite a reputation amongst the locals. They were, in short, somewhat fearful. The village was made up largely of immigrants, and Linda
portrayed herself to be a studied, moneyed American doctor. Who were they to intervene even if their best senses told them that something was very, very wrong. Every now and then they might catch glimpses of her patients, skeletal, gaunt creatures with tight, pale flesh, taking in the air and filled with conviction, or some would wonder later, was that fear. But Claire and Dorothea would see this all for themselves
soon enough. In April of nineteen eleven, over a month into treatment and too weak to walk, they were taken by stretcher from their hotel to a fairy launch with Wilderness Heights as their final destination. It was estimated that each were about seventy pounds at the time, all wrapped in bandages and barely speaking. Just before boarding the boat,
they were intercepted by Linda's attorney. He spoke with Claire kindly yet authoritatively, giving her a pen and directions of what to write on a piece of paper that he supplied, and most importantly, he needed her signature. The letters intended recipient was Margaret Conway, the sister's longtime nurse who lived in Australia. But it wasn't a postcard. No, it was a codicil to a will naming Linda Hazard and her
institute as the beneficiary. Claire signed it, it was sealed, and the sisters were taken away in a thicket of spruce and fir on an island separated from the mainland by only a few miles. Claire and Dora might as well have been thousands of miles from each other. They remained in separate spaces at Linda's insistence, and were totally bedbound. She told the sisters that they were healing, but any
progress would be impaired by distraction. And they missed each other mightily, and I have a hard time imagining that my faith wouldn't waver at this point. The record isn't exactly clear on what happened next, but what we do know is that all the way in Australia, the girl's beloved Margaret Conway received a cryptic telegram from Claire telling her to come urgently. She hadn't been in touch with the sisters and knew that something must be terribly wrong.
She arrived by steamship to Vancouver as soon as she could June first of nineteen eleven, and was met by Linda Hazzard's now husband Sam. He regretfully informed her the Claire was already dead. That was when Margaret realized that something terrible had happened and was still happening. She insisted on being taken to see both women, one dead and one very close to it, and appointed herself as Dorothea's nursemaid.
In a brazen gesture of hubrists, Linda invited a stunned Margaret into her office, where she revealed that she had been designated as the executioner of Claire's estate and named guardian of Dorothea. She did this all decked out in Claire's exquisite dressing gown and jewels. It was clear to Margaret that this wasn't Linda's first ruse, but she was hell bound and determined to make sure it was her last. Margaret wouldn't believe for a single moment a word of
what Linda was telling her. She quickly deployed telegraphs and assembled a team that included a local lawyer by the name of John Herbert, who also happened to be Claire and Dorothea's uncle. He shelled out a thousand dollars for the release of Dorothea into his custody, in a gesture that basically amounted to pain a ransom according to Linda Hazard, though this was just a fee for services rendered. Of course, the authorities, meanwhile, had been waiting to pounce on Linda
for a long long time. The sisters, remember, were not the first of her patients for whom she had forged checks and signed over estates. So when her predatory business practices became clear, the authorities arrested Linda on a charge of first degree murder for starving Claire to death. The first day of Linda's trial packed the courthouse with curious, dubious onlookers, who all heard stories about how the sisters screamed in pain during treatments, took physical beatings, and were
brainwashed into believing that they were going in saying. Those on the stand testified that Linda and Sam gorged themselves on their patients trappings of wealth, with one claim even going so far as to say that Linda's husband, Sam took gold crowns from the mouths of dead patience. And all the while Linda maintained her innocence, she was furious, insistent that the only reason she was being persecuted was because she had been successful in business as a woman.
In the end, she was convicted of manslaughter and sentenced to twenty years behind bars for reasons unknown. She was released within two catching a ship to New Zealand in nineteen twenty, where she opened a sanitarium that specialized in you guessed it, the fasting cure. Though not as many people came as she had hoped, those in her care continued to die. She again went on trial, paid a
one hundred dollars fine, and then left the country. She returned to Olala, to her beloved and bedeviled wilderness heights where she could live out the end of her days. In nineteen thirty eight, she took to bed and began her own She was seventy one by now and in ill health. She wanted to prove that her method indeed worked.
On a warm morning in June, she died cold, alone, emaciated and implicated, in the depths of as many as forty individuals under her care, all of whom were free to walk out her doors if only their bodies could carry them. Obviously, the public interest in people like Linda Hazard and other fast promoting Charlatan's wasn't eradicated with her trial. In fact, a notable contemporary journalist, Upton Sinclair of the Jungle Fame, published his book The Fasting Cure in nineteen eleven.
But there's something very important to note here. There's a marked difference between working to understand the physiology of fasting so that we can employ it for our body's well being and those who, under the guise of care, exploit a practice meant to heal for their own ill gotten gain. And throughout the century, fasting continued to maintain clusters of adherence the world over for its social, political, cultural, and
spiritual meaning. In nineteen eighty two, four doctors teamed up and published a paper in the Western Journal of Medicine. They declared that an appreciation and understanding of fasting was essential to understanding food as intervention and how food deprivation works in treating various diseases. They also identified an upward trend in the practice and cautioned medical practitioners that they needed to take heat about how complicated of a prescription
it can actually be. Even today, elements of fasting still show up in many wellness plans. The most popular in headline grabbing is probably intermittent fasting, but even that is just another repackaged, repurposed, and reworked fasting cure from yesteryear. The desire to diet for preventative measures is present, as is the promotion of the idea that diet manipulation can still be a tool to heal what damage we've already incurred.
There is truth to this, but the idea is a slippery one that can lead to many different manners of disordered eating. Stricting, or whatever name we might give it. Today is alive and well in our complicated world of eating, and it shows no sign of ever going away. I know that this episode was a bit hard to stomach, no pun intended, I swear even today, the way that we talk about food, think about food and access food
is a really complicated topic. If you've ever learned anything about the history of the American food pyramid, for example, then you'll know a little something about what I'm talking about. But don't go away just yet. Stick around through this brief sponsor break and my teammates Robin Miniter. We'll be back with one more enlightening story. Once upon a time there was a young man named Tarar who hungered for fame so much so that he would eat just about
anything to achieve it. And eighty eight are a hungry showman arrived in Paris at just eighteen years old. He was a scrawny little thing, weighing in at barely one hundred pounds and giving the appearance that he was getting just enough to eat. He hardly demanded a second glance from a passer by until he opened his mouth, that is, and people saw what was going into it. And that was just about anything he could get his hands on,
edible and not edible things alike. Terrar had been working on his act for years, and it seems that everywhere he went he delighted, shocked, and horrified people, not with just his willingness, but his compulsion to consume. A short time into a stay in Paris, he was hospitalized with an illness. Here at the hospital, he was giving quadruple the typical food allowance of many patients and scrounge up
scraps from others. He was still insatiable. It said that he would eat the poultices and bandages that he found, and that's only my hope that they were unseasoned, if you will. It was even reported that while he was there he ate live animals, including an eyewitness account from the ch doctor who stated that Tarar ate a cat
whole and alive, right down to its skeleton. It's also been reported that he was found in the hospital drinking blood from patients who had recently been let, and that he had been found in the hospitals Morgue helping himself to human cadavers. Tarar had suddenly become the hospital's most confounding case, so they treated him in as many ways as they could conjure, with acids, opium, tobacco, hard boiled eggs or whatever the apothecary could throw at him that
he hadn't already helped himself too. But still nothing helped, and he continued to scavenge outside and inside of the hospital walls. It was only when a one year old child disappeared from its hospital bed, with Tarar being the main suspect, that the place finally drove him away. He would die four years later of tuberculosis, but the doctor's remained perplexed as to why he was so hungry. They wondered if there could be something else going on with
him beyond the insanity they assumed. If we want to give credit to the game of respected diagnosis, it's possible that Tarar was afflicted with polyphasia, which is characterized by an incessant sensation of hunger and desire to eat beyond the body's needs and capabilities. It's often a symptom of a larger underlying medical condition, and these symptoms don't always appear as dramatically as they did in Tarar. In fact, polyphasia symptoms can appear during PMS or with the onset
of dementia. What is also true is that we have now developed orexigenics or compounds that they have the ability to induce hyperphasia, But instead of being something to be feared, it's something that can be celebrated and it can sometimes do life saving Hunger, you see, can be helpful. One of these drugs might be prescribed when a patient is experiencing malnutrition and extreme wasting in the cases such as
cystic fibrosis, cancer, or AIDS. It's here that we once again call back to our friend Hippocrates, who believed that food is medicine. But to truly reap the benefits from that idea, we have to cut through a lot of noise of contemporary diet culture. We have to learn and sometimes relearn, how to eat. Our endlessly complicated cultural program gives us so many messages about food, what is good and what is bad, and has given us an endlessly changing set of rules. There are, and will continue to
be diet fads that come and go. Some will be more destructive and some will be more liberating than others. It's up to us, it seems, to determine who has our best interests in mind and who might be out to profit grim and mild presents. Bedside Manners was executive produced by Aaron Manky and narrated by Aaron Manky and Robin Miniter. Writing for this season was provided by Robin Miniter, with research by Sam Alberty, Taylor Haggerdorn, and Robin Miniter.
Production assistance was provided by Josh Thayne, Jesse Funk, Alex Williams, and Matt Frederick. You can learn more about this show, the Grim and Mild team, and all the other podcasts that we make over at Grimm and Mild dot com, and, as always, thanks for listening.