The Man Behind “The San”

Ed Ayers: Brian, when you hear the name Kellogg, there’s probably one thing that immediately jumps to mind (singing).

Brian Balogh: Well Ed, I’m afraid that’s a little before my time. I think-

Ed Ayers: It’s hard to imagine such a time, but I agree with you.

Brian Balogh: Maybe after it. And anyway, what came to my mind was Cornflakes.

Ed Ayers: Oh, yeah. And I can just picture the box and how happy you were to see it in the morning in breakfast. Sure. Today, Kellogg is synonymous with spoonfuls of crunchy sugar coated breakfast cereals. But back in the late 19th century, the name Kellogg was known not for its cereals as much as for its yes, sanitarium. Here’s scholar Brian C. Wilson.

Brian C. Wilson: The Battle Creek Sanitarium was for a time, for many decades in fact, probably the most famous health and wellness destination not only in the United States, but it was known internationally.

Ed Ayers: You might have heard of a sanatorium, but sanitarium was a term made up by the man behind the whole operation, Dr. John Harvey Kellogg. He was put in charge of the facility in Battle Creek Michigan in 1876. At that time, it was called the much less appealing Western Health Reform Institute, but Kellogg had a different idea.

Brian C. Wilson: He just said, “Okay. It’s now the Battle Creek Sanitarium.” And somebody pointed out, “Well, sanitarium really isn’t a word, it’s sanatorium.” And he said, “Well, it’s a word I’ve coined because sanatoriums are places where people go to get well, and a sanitarium is a place where people come to learn how to stay well.”

Ed Ayers: Now, at first glance, Dr. Kellogg may not have been the obvious pick for the director of a wellness center. He was a portly fellow who stood at a modest 5 foot 4 inches, but his church, The Seventh-Day Adventist singled him out as a leader at a young age and paid for him to attend medical school.

Brian C. Wilson: And so when he came back to Battle Creek in 1875, he was only 23-24 years old, but he was the best qualified physician the Adventist had. And the idea here was that Del and White had a vision that the Seventh-day Adventist should create a health reform institute in Battle Creek. Ellen White was a prophetess and a leader and had a series of health revelations that basically said that God felt that the Adventist needed to take better care of their health.

Brian C. Wilson: There is a belief that you could only have a pure soul if you had a pure body. And John Harvey Kellogg promoted a vegetarian diet. And he believes that it was important not only for people’s physical health, but also for their spiritual health.

Speaker 4: A man that lives on pork, fine flour bread, rich pies, and cakes, and condiments, drinks tea and coffee, and uses tobacco might as well try to fly as to be chased in thought.

Brian C. Wilson: If you disregarded what he called the laws of life or the laws of health by abusing your body, by eating a bad diet or drinking alcohol or smoking, then you are not only harming yourself physically, but you are also basically offending God. And so there is a very kind of strong moral emphasis on Kellogg’s physiology.

Speaker 4: Disease is cured by the body itself, not by doctors or remedies. All the inventions and devices ever constructed by the human hand or conceived by the human mind, no matter how delicate how intricate, and complicated are simple childish toys compared with that most marvelously wrought mechanism, the human body.

Ed Ayers: So what would you have experienced if you showed up in Battle Creek at the sanitarium? What would your arrival and day there have been like?

Brian C. Wilson: Well, people would actually come for weeks at a time. And it really became a kind of destination, a kind of resort. And by the 1890s, he built the thing into a huge kind of grand hotel complex of buildings. This giant kind of Victorian pile. And you would be admitted and have a preliminary consultation and then based on that, they would basically tailor a kind of routine for you both in terms of diet and Dr. Kellogg was a real demon for exercise. He believe everybody needed to get far more exercise than they were getting. So they had a very large gymnasium, they had tennis courts, and all sorts of things outside for people to do. But they also had a full laboratory, a pharmacy, all the things that you would see in a modern hospital.

Brian C. Wilson: And so over a course of couple of weeks, maybe even a month, people would basically eat the vegetarian diet, do the exercises, undergo a variety of treatments. Some of them quite novel. Dr. Kellogg was really interested in the properties of light and sunlight, so he created a kind of looks like the first tanning bed, the first light therapy bed. So it really dependent on what the original diagnosis was what your days at the sanitarium would be.

Ed Ayers: So what would be a typical diagnosis? What would be wrong with people when they showed up?

Brian C. Wilson: Well, Dr. Kellogg was really fixated on digestion and he really believe that the colon was kind of the heart of human health and well-being. And he bought into this theory called autointoxication, and this was the idea that undigested food that remain in the colon for too long would poison not only the colon but the entire body. And that’s why he had this real emphasis on regularity and getting the food through.

Brian C. Wilson: They also used enemas quite a bit in order to clean out people’s system. So this whole idea of detoxing goes back to the early 19th century. Now Kellogg was a little bit more inventive about this. He used not only water enemas, but he was excited by yogurt. And the thing he was excited about was that the countries where yogurt was consumed seemed to have longer life spans than other places. And so he attributed this to the constituents of yogurt, but the fact that it also had living bacterial cultures in it.

Brian C. Wilson: And so he was interested in manipulating the flora of the gut long again before this becomes mainstream, but he thought he could do this either by eating yogurt or by using yogurt as an enema.

Ed Ayers: Wow! Now, this was a very appealing place, right? There are a lot of famous people came. Could you tell us about some of those folks?

Brian C. Wilson: Some presidents came. Taft came at a certain point. Henry Ford was very interested in some of the ideas of John Harvey Kellogg. Explorers came, movie stars occasionally came. He also catered to really the kind of elite of the United States. I mean the prices tend to be a little bit on the high side for a room, $10 to $20 a day. The interesting thing is the Battle Creek Sanitarium began as a Seventh-Day Adventist institution for Seventh-day Adventist, but slowly but surely over the years Dr. Kellogg really opened it up to anybody who wanted to come. And he courted the rich and the famous because he knew that they could actually get the word out and spread his ideas.

Ed Ayers: Right. And were they satisfied customers?

Brian C. Wilson: Most were. Most were very satisfied and kept coming back season after season and became a kind of watering hole in that sense without the alcohol. And people really look forward to their time at the Battle Creek Sanitarium. That wasn’t always the case. And there’s one very famous exception to this.

Brian C. Wilson: There was a man named to C. W. Post. C. W. Post was a failed business man from Texas who had digestive issues. And so he came and checked himself into the Battle Creek Sanitarium, but apparently he just hated the place from the beginning and he didn’t like Dr. Kellogg. But he really liked the cereal products that were available. And he and his wife managed to get the recipes and the manufacturing process, the secrets of that while they were staying at the sanitarium and then left and then Post turned around and created the Post Cereal Company which was really the first successful breakfast cereal company in Battle Creek. And that set off a boom that lasted for years.

Ed Ayers: And sounds as if Kellogg is developing this kind of empire. Does that put him at tension with the church? I mean you’ve talked about how he’s now courting the the well-bred and and well-fed. Does he have a rift with the church?

Brian C. Wilson: He does. Kellogg was always concerned about the harmony of Science and religion, and in the early 20th century, Seventh-Day Adventism became increasingly fundamentalist in its approach, and its rejection of Darwinian evolution. And Kellogg who is always mindful of his reputation as a doctor, really didn’t want to be seen as somebody who was anti-science. And so he developed a theology, a kind of eminent theology of God that harmonize for him better with his understanding of the development of science, and this put him at odds with the Seventh-day Adventist Church. In 1907, he was disfellowshipped. He was basically kicked out of the Seventh-day Adventist Church.

Ed Ayers: So part of that era, these ideas of Darwinism but also of health, it led Kellogg to have some relationships to eugenics?

Brian C. Wilson: Yes. Well, eugenics of course is this idea that you can control human reproduction such that only people who have “good genetics” can basically pass their genes on. And this was thought to be a way to improve the human race. It’s interesting because Seventh-Day Adventism also taught that from the days of Adam and Eve that human beings had been degenerating in terms of their life spans because according to the Old Testament, Adam and Eve and the patriarchs live for just phenomenal periods of time. And then slowly but surely human beings, their life spans became less and less. One of the interpretations of this was that human beings were eating a bad diet and basically abusing their bodies. The idea was by doing that, you were passing on defective genes, and so the human race was actually generating overtime.

Brian C. Wilson: Kellogg was concerned because he felt that in the 19th century so many more, he called them race poisons, things like tobacco and alcohol and meat, were becoming more and more available to more and more of the population. And this was accelerating the degeneration of the human race alcoholism.

Speaker 4: Alcoholism, the opium habit, and tobaccoism are a trio of poison habits, which have been weighty handicaps to human progress during the last three centuries. In the United States, the subtle spell of opium has been broken by restrictive legislation. The grip of the rum demon has been loosened by the prohibition amendment to the Constitution, but the tobacco habit still maintains its stranglehold and more than 100 million victims of tobaccoism daily burn incense to the smoke god.

Brian C. Wilson: He basically talked about a kind of biological apocalypse, if you will, that the human race if it continued on its path would eventually become extinct.

Ed Ayers: We began our conversation talking about Cornflakes, but that’s a different Kellogg.

Brian C. Wilson: Yeah, I know, you’re correct. In the 1890s, Kellogg and his wife Ella Eaton Kellogg got together with Kellogg’s brother Will K Kellogg, and Will K Kellogg at that point was the business manager of the Battle Creek Sanitarium and obviously brilliant, brilliant businessman that always lived in the shadow of his brother. Well, the three of them got together in an effort to design foods that would be more palatable to their guest. And after much experimentation, they came up with this idea of flattening out grains and baking them and creating essentially what we know today is breakfast cereals.

Brian C. Wilson: The problem was Dr. Kellogg, he always had a health food company associated with the Battle Creek Sanitarium, but he really didn’t want to exploit this commercially because he was afraid that it would hurt his reputation as a doctor. But after C.W. Post managed to purloin the the recipes and make a fortune, Will K Kellogg basically had a falling out with his brother because Will K Kellogg wanted to basically exploit Kellogg’s Corn Flakes as a national brand. And so this became very, very acrimonious over the years and the two brothers fought over who got to use the Kellogg name. And unfortunately, never reconciled even up until Dr. Kellogg died in 1943.

Ed Ayers: Wow. There are things that we still believe today that Kellogg introduced to us. Can you give us the best case that we can make for Kellogg’s positive enduring legacy?

Brian C. Wilson: Well, it think the major thing that Kellogg should be remembered for is his emphasis on holistic health, on the connection between mind, body, and spirit for optimum wellness. He really believe that you needed to basically focus on all three things to be a healthy and happy human being.

Brian C. Wilson: It’s interesting because medicine has always been as much an art as a science, and so a lot of it is trial and error. And a lot of what we remember Dr. Kellogg for are some of the things he didn’t quite get right, or some of the treatments we know that are counterproductive. But there are a lot of other things that he did that continued to be practiced today.

Brian C. Wilson: For example, he was very concerned about people’s digestion and of course he wanted people to be regular and that became kind of a theme of his. And so one of the things he developed was the use of psyllium seeds as a bulk fiber. And of course that’s the basis for things like Metamucil today. Some of his practices like he promoted UV light, which he thought was very helpful to the body and of course we know that it’s not. But on the other hand, he had some good ideas as well.

Ed Ayers: Brian C. Wilson is a professor of American religious history at Western Michigan University. He’s also the author of the book, Dr. John Harvey Kellogg and the Religion of Biologic Living.