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great, or delirium had intervened, codeine and other opiates had been used unsparingly. In addition to all this, in five days’ time, two quarts of brandy had been poured into the drugged interior. The boy could neither lie down nor sit up, and his position was a painful compromise.”
    She worried that the boy would die, but she felt compelled to take instantaneous and decisive action.
    Edward Anderson was placed on an immediate fast. Dr. Burfield stopped the drugs, the brandy, the
insanity
of a prescribed treatment that only attempted to cover the symptoms, not attack the root of the disease. She massaged the boy’s hot and limp frame and employed the “internal bath”—the enema—to eliminate matter from the lower bowel. Within an hour, improvement came. The pulse and temperature crawled toward the normal ranges.
    When the doctor left the Riverside Avenue address, the boy in the back bedroom was resting more comfortably than he had in days.
    And though Mrs. Anderson had sought out Dr. Burfield, she was still apprehensive about the course of treatment. He was a growing boy. He needed nourishment. The fasting specialist pressed on; as far as she could see there was no choice but to take the drastic measures. Over the next days, the fever, the pain, the swelling ceased. By the third day of the fast, he was able to sleep fully and restfully.
    On December 28, Dr. Burfield broke Edward’s fast with two servings of tomato broth—morning and evening. As he regained strength, the amount of food was increased.
    Ed Anderson, as far as his family was concerned, was a miracle boy, and his savior was Dr. Burfield. She alone had delivered him from certain death. No matter her critics, no matter the scandals that popped up like crocuses through the snow, she brought medical salvation to the desperate.
    Linda Burfield Hazzard would frequently recall this case. It was one of many she would never forget. One of the Williamson sisters would never forget it either.
    Dr. Hazzard even wrote a letter about the case a half-dozen years after the fact:

    One month from the date of my first call, the boy came across town to my office, a distance of six miles by car, with a walk of four blocks at the end of the line. Within a few days judicious building-up exercises were begun, and in six weeks from the 19th of December the patient was back at work in one of the down-town business houses. So far as I can learn, he has since adhered strictly to the diet and exercise advised, and, when I last saw him, he had developed into a sturdy, robust youth with seemingly perfect health.
             
    N ELLIE B. SHERMAN had a high forehead and haggard eyes set so uncomfortably close together they pinched her nose to a yelp. At forty, she already had the kind of loose, wrinkled mouth that suggested a paper sack that had been opened and closed many, many times. Wee fissures radiated from Nellie’s lips.
    A nurse since graduating from Homeopathic Hospital in Boston fourteen years before, Nellie had found herself in Seattle starting over when her late-in-life marriage to a jealous man named Frank Otis ended in time to save her life in 1908. In a hideous routine that played far too many times, within three weeks of their wedding, Frank Otis had beat Nellie and accused her of adultery with a number of different men. The reality was that there had been no others. Nellie Sherman had waited a lifetime for Frank Otis, and when the marriage shattered, she expected to live her life alone. The marriage had lasted but a year.
    Nellie met Dr. Hazzard on the morning boat from Olalla to Seattle. The nurse had come from her bungalow near Alki Point, West Seattle, to Olalla to care for various members of the Lillie clan. On the deck of the
Virginia
one morning, Linda Hazzard sought out the petite woman in the nurse’s uniform. The doctor confided her plans for a world-class sanitarium at Wilderness Heights, as if it were information she seldom imparted. She needed