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In the 19th century, the medical field was a wild west of deadly proportions.

Doctors prescribed mercury pills to cure, and I use the term loosely, syphilis and tuberculosis.

Cocaine was used to help with toothaches. Many medical treatments had no

effect on the patients who sought them, and sometimes the treatments made their condition worse.

Fed up with the failings of the medical system, many Americans started turning to forms of

alternative medicine, natural treatments that

would heal rather than harm. Even John Harvey Kellogg, the physician best known for creating

cornflake cereal, took the leap into alternative medicine. In 1876, he opened a sanitarium in Battle Creek, Michigan.

Patients flocked to him for treatments like

light therapy, yogurt enumas, and flogging.

Whether or not these strange treatments actually worked,

Kellogg's sanitarium had no shortage of guests.

Patients trusted him to cure their ailments, and because of that, they were willing to try

anything. Twenty years after Kellogg's rise to medical fame, another alternative medicine figure

emerged. Her name was Linda Hazard,

and she believed the cure to any disease was fasting. But unlike Kellogg, Linda's so-called treatments

often led to death. Blinded by what she thought was a medical marvel,

...