Linda Hazard: A Woman Who Persisted in a Time When Men Ruled Medicine

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When Linda Hazard was young, a doctor told her father that his children were suffering from intestinal parasites. The doctor prescribed them what were called blue-mass pills. Nineteen-century recipes for these blue-Mass pills called for mercury, licorice root, and dead rose petals. Abraham Lincoln reportedly started taking blue- mass pills for melancholia after a breakup.

In 1911, two sisters traveled to Seattle to meet a "doctor" named Linda Hazzard. The sisters didn’t seem very sick, but when they arrived, Dr. Hazzard told them they didn’t have a moment to lose – they needed to begin her treatment right away.

A few months later, one of the sisters wrote a letter to her old governess. “I am wonderfully better in fact,” she said, “getting stronger by leaps.” But her handwriting was messier than usual, and her sentences ran together and overlapped.

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