Therapeutic fasting in the 19th–20th centuries

Different jobs, same family name

A sacred fast is a calendar. A hunger strike is speech. A weekday 16:8 is a schedule you chose. A therapeutic fast in this period was sold as treatment: rest the gut, “cure” disease, or reduce an obese body in a hospital.

English still uses one word. The jobs do not share a protocol. Nature-cure homes, magazine “fasting cures,” German Heilfasten, and mid-century hospital starvation sat on overlapping shelves. They are not one lineage you can recover with Open mode.

Reviews or videos that average them under “fasting” mix jobs that should stay separate. Keep the job in view before you borrow the hours.

Nature cure and the public fast

Nineteenth-century hydropathy and nature cure already used less food, water, rest, and “don’t interfere.” Fasting was one lever in that kit, next to baths and spare meals. It was still closer to a sickbed than to a consumer window.

Then it became a spectacle. In 1880, Henry S. Tanner, an eclectic physician, fasted forty days in Clarendon Hall in Manhattan, watched by doctors and a paying public. Medical opinion had often held that a person could last about a week or ten days without food. Tanner’s point was that the body could last much longer, and that “starvation” could be sold as a cure. He then lectured. A public fast is not a trial, and it is not a 16:8 origin story.

Skipping breakfast as hygiene (Edward Dewey’s “no-breakfast plan” around 1900) is a quieter cousin: a daily habit, not a forty-day hall. It is still not time-restricted eating. It is a diet product with medical-adjacent branding.

Magazines, sanitariums, and the fasting cure

Bernarr Macfadden made fasting a Physical Culture story: magazines, a Chicago “Healthatorium,” books with titles like Fasting for Health. Upton Sinclair’s 1911 The Fasting Cure, dedicated to Macfadden, told readers that long fasts had remade his health, and that fasting could treat almost any disease, including cancers and infections later generations would not assign to a water fast. Doctors at the time already called that dangerous. A famous novelist is not a methods section. See How to read fasting research.

Sinclair also pointed readers to Macfadden’s Healthatorium and to Linda Hazzard’s sanitarium in Washington. Popular literature and a clinic that killed sat on the same shelf.

In Germany, Otto Buchinger, a naval physician, fasted about nineteen days in 1919 for rheumatism, then opened a fasting clinic in 1920. His Heilfasten used juices, vegetable broth, tea, and a little honey, plus rest, walks, and a house style. That is not a water-only fast, and it is not 16:8. Family clinics in that line still exist. Continuity is not a safety argument for doing the same thing at home.

When the cure killed

Linda Hazzard ran Wilderness Heights near Olalla, Washington, a sanitarium locals called Starvation Heights. Patients were put on near-starvation with sips of juice, enemas, and “massage.” Claire Williamson, a British woman, died there in 1911 at about fifty pounds. Hazzard was convicted of manslaughter. At least a dozen deaths are attributed to her fasting cure. She had a loophole license as a fasting specialist, not a trustworthy medical degree.

A sanitarium is not proof that “supervised” means safe. Supervision is only as good as the supervisor. Who should be careful with fasting still applies. A historic clinic does not cancel pregnancy, eating-disorder history, insulin, or under-18.

Do not romanticize the deaths as “they did it wrong, so a modern water fast is the real method.” The lesson is that a product which starves can kill, including when it is sold as medicine.

Hospital starvation for obesity

Mid-century hospitals tried total fasting as obesity treatment. Walter Bloom’s 1959 paper treated a short fast as an introduction to reducing. Later hospitals kept people on water and vitamins for weeks. Drenick and colleagues reported fasts from twelve to 117 days, with gout, severe low blood pressure, and anemia among the complications.

Then the deaths. Lancet reports in 1968 and 1969 described sudden death, including ventricular fibrillation, during or after therapeutic starvation, even in people who had been improving in hospital. One 1969 case was a twenty-year-old who reached her “ideal” weight and died; her heart muscle fibers were fragmented. The authors’ conclusion was that prolonged total starvation is unsafe.

A later supervised case, Angus Barbieri’s 382 days in Dundee from 1965 to 1966, is a case report. It is not a plan to copy. Weight often returned after hospital starvation as a class. The method was largely abandoned as routine obesity care. If you already mean many days is for people who already mean weeks. Weight, body composition, and adherence is what modern trials recorded: modest, short-term, and not a reason to add a scale here. Alternate-day and prolonged fasting studies is what later trials actually test. Those trials are not that hospital starvation.

A medical offshoot: seizures, not a 16:8

Early twentieth-century physicians noticed that fasting could quiet seizures for a time. At the Mayo Clinic, Russell Wilder proposed a very high-fat ketogenic diet in 1921 so children with epilepsy might get the ketones of a fast without being starved indefinitely.

That is a supervised medical diet for a specific disease. It is not proof that a 16:8 “invented keto,” and it is not a fat-loss origin story. Do not borrow a pediatric epilepsy protocol as a weekday eating window.

What we cannot borrow

Keep the hours and drop the hospital, the physician, and the stop rule, and you are dieting next to a clinic. You are not in one.

Tanner’s forty days is not Open mode. Sinclair’s book is not a trial. Buchinger juice and broth is not a 16:8 and not a DIY water fast. Hazzard is the warning, not a “do it right this time.” Hospital starvation deaths are why a multi-day stretch is not two 16:8s stacked. See Open-ended and multi-day fasts.

“Clinics have always done this” is not a safety argument. Autophagy headlines and stage badges do not translate. See Autophagy: what headlines get wrong and What the stages on the timer mean.

Do not average a public spectacle, a juice clinic, a killer sanitarium, and a 1960s obesity hospital under one “therapeutic fasting” headline that then blesses a phone timer.

What this is not

Nothing here is a manual for a water fast, a juice fast, or a reset. A clinician is the person who can tell you whether any of this is safe for you.

Fasting in ancient medicine stays with an older sickbed regimen. Fasting as protest and politics stays with speech. A hunger strike is not a sanitarium product.

Coffee and the eating window stay in Everyday Fasting. This history is not a reason to add a scale. How the clinic product became a consumer app, including 5:2, 16:8, and stage badges, is From clinic to consumer app.

How this meets the timer

MyFastingClock is a diet-IF clock and a library. Unlimited tracking means a longer plan is not paywalled. The clock does not become a clinic or a Buchinger house, and it does not invite therapeutic starvation.

Use the online fasting timer for a plan you chose, usually a gentle daily window near your overnight gap. End Fast when you eat, or when you should stop. History here is so you do not mistake a preset for a hospital protocol.

The next history note is From clinic to consumer app. For this week, Choosing a starting window, Who should be careful with fasting, and When to stop a fast still decide more than a quote from a sanitarium.