Harriet N. Austin

Harriet Newell Austin was an American hydrotherapist, author and dress-reform advocate, born in Connecticut on 31 August 1826. She graduated in 1851 from Mary Gove Nichols' American Hydropathic Institute, one of the irregular schools that trained women physicians when mainstream medical schools would not admit them. She worked at a water cure sanitarium in Owasco, New York, then joined James Caleb Jackson at Glen Haven, became his business partner and became editor of their magazine The Laws of Life and Journal of Health. After the move to Dansville in 1858 they opened Our Home on the Hillside, by 1866 the largest hydrotherapy institution in the country. She designed the American costume, a knee-length tunic worn over loose pants, and wrote Baths and How to Take Them. She was an early practitioner of natural hygiene and a vegetarian, and died at North Adams, Massachusetts in May 1891.