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 empty an obese body in a ward.

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” are doing the mash-up this cluster exists to undo. 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. It is not water-only, not 16:8, and not a protocol this app will teach. 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 wards 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 on the ward. 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 of a man who fasted hundreds of days under medical care is a case report, not a protocol. Weight often returned. The method was largely abandoned as routine obesity care. Weight, body composition, and adherence is the modern research shelf: modest, short-term, and not a reason to add a scale here. Alternate-day and prolonged fasting studies is what later trials actually test. They are not this ward.

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, drop the ward, 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 ward under one “therapeutic fasting” headline that then blesses a phone timer.

What this is not

It is not a manual for a water fast, a juice fast, or a “reset.” It is not medical advice.

It is not Fasting in ancient medicine. Humors and barley gruel are a different century’s regimen. It is not Fasting as protest and politics. A hunger strike is speech, not a sanitarium product.

It is not Everyday Fasting. Coffee and the eating window stay on those pages. It is not a reason to add a scale. The next chapter in this cluster is how the clinic product became a consumer app: 5:2, 16:8, stage badges. That is Part 6, when it ships.

How this meets the timer

MyFastingClock is a diet-IF clock and a library. Unlimited tracking means a longer plan is not paywalled. It is not a clinic, not a Buchinger house, and not an invitation to 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 ward.

Next in this cluster, when it ships: 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.