A few minutes after he was satisfied there was a full house, Dr. Kellogg made his grand entrance, walking briskly down the central aisle, acknowledging the faces he recognized, shaking a few hands, and ascending a richly stained, quarter-sawn oak platform placed at the front of the room. On the platform was the same box in which the patients had deposited their burning queries all week. With dramatic flair, Dr. Kellogg reached into it, read the question aloud, sometimes pausing for nervous laughter on particularly sensitive topics, and then proceeded to give an authoritative answer.2 Many of the questions were written either by Dr. Kellogg himself or by one of his staff. Such planned inquiries emphasized the health messages he especially wanted to strike home to his audience. Impromptu or planned, John enchanted them all with his brilliance and tinny-voiced delivery, which increased in speed as he became especially excited about a particular topic.
One of many Battle Creek Sanitarium advertisements that ran in the leading national magazines of the day Credit 71
On some evenings the doctor dispensed advice on bedwetting: “Faith will sometimes do much toward effecting a cure when other remedies fail.”3 On others he warned parents against trying to change their left-handed children into “righties”: “Let him alone is the latest verdict of science….Life is not long enough for the equal training of both hands.”4 Many nights he warned his patients about the risks of fretting, “worry is a veritable demon that gets into you and takes possession of you….Cast it out; flee from worry.”5
Dr. Kellogg’s weekly “Question Box Hour,” circa 1920s Credit 72
Too frequently, the doctor warned against the sin of masturbation, or “self-abuse,” which he described as a scourge afflicting both American boys and girls. It was an all but guaranteed path to disease, diminished vitality, and ruin. During these talks, Dr. Kellogg placed parents on high alert to monitor the activities of once cheerful and pleasant children who suddenly turned into morose, grumpy, and reclusive teenagers. He also advised mothers, when sorting the family’s laundry, to check for semen stains on a boy’s pajamas and sheets and for vaginal discharges on their daughters’ bed clothing.
Over the years, there have been many unsubstantiated claims suggesting Dr. Kellogg invented Corn Flakes as a cure for masturbation. Yet this apocryphal tale simply does not ring true, beginning with the fact that it was Will who created the recipe for Corn Flakes as a tasty breakfast cereal for healthy people and not as a treatment for sexual miscreants; John’s original flaked cereals, it will be recalled, were wheat flakes. What the doctor did teach and prescribe was that “to a person struggling to repress evil desires, simplicity in diet and the avoidance of exciting and stimulating foods is of the greatest consequence.” Hence, “excitatory” condiments, meat, sugar, candy, tea, coffee, and alcohol should be avoided and the diet “should consist chiefly of fruits, grains, vegetables and milk.” The other panaceas Dr. Kellogg prescribed were physical exercise and adequate sleep. This medical advice, incidentally, constituted Dr. Kellogg’s chief remedies for almost every condition he treated, from the sexual to the digestive.6
For recalcitrant masturbators, Dr. Kellogg offered an armamentarium of medical and surgical procedures. For example, he began treating boys by bandaging their hands and, if that did not work, circumcision. Astonishingly, the doctor performed the latter without anesthetics because the resultant pain tended to have “a salutary effect upon the mind, especially if connected with the idea of punishment, as it may well be in some cases.” As an added benefit, the soreness caused by the circumcision lasted for several weeks and “interrupts the practice, and if it had not previously become too firmly fixed, it may be forgotten and not resumed.”7 For the most intractable cases, he performed a barbaric operation where silver sutures or wires were passed “from one side to the other” through the foreskin as it was drawn over the glans penis to prevent erections.8
Young women predisposed to self-abuse were equally concerning for the doctor. For masturbating girls (especially those who had sexual orgasms “several times daily”) he recommended applying blistering doses of “pure carbolic acid to the clitoris as an excellent means of allaying the abnormal excitement.”9 In the case of the female “nymphomaniac,” he advised, “cool sitz baths, the cool enema, a spare diet, the application of blisters and other irritants to the sensitive parts of the sexual organs, the removal of the clitoris and nymphae [i.e., the labia minora of the vulva] constitute the most proper treatment.”10
What seems most surprising from the distance of more than a century is that the entire audience did not immediately get up and exit the room each time Dr. Kellogg offered such draconian (and excruciating) medical advice. On the other hand, this was a period when many Americans considered sex to be “dirty” and sexually transmitted diseases such as syphilis and gonorrhea killed tens of thousands of Americans each year and made hundreds of thousands more miserable with debilitating and embarrassing symptoms.
Beware of tight dresses! Credit 73
For the corseted women in the audience, Dr. Kellogg warned against the fashionable, tight-fitting garments of the day. Such strictures, he believed, caused physical decline, lower birth rates, neuralgias, muscle injuries, respiratory problems, poor posture, dyspepsia, and damage to both the reproductive and digestive organs. Dr. Kellogg was particularly concerned about the practice of young women seeking smaller waists by means of “tight bands, corset waists, or corsets.” He noted with horror how he had examined hundreds of young girls as early as 9 years of age wearing corsets, resulting in the “young lady’s figure [developing] into a mold like a cucumber in a bottle.” The solution—and a much more aesthetic look, he insisted—was to wear loose-fitting, comfortable clothing. Unbound garments allowed the female form to develop as God intended. As an added piece of advice on accessorizing, he urged women to avoid earrings, which stretched earlobes out of shape “by the savage habit of weighing them down with wires and stones.”11 Ever the entrepreneur, Dr. Kellogg offered for sale, through one of his side companies, the Sanitary and Electrical Supply Company, “a new system of dress” he had designed, which was “practical, healthful and artistic.”12 Aesthetics aside, John more often encouraged his female patients on the importance of vigorous exercise because “there is no reason why women should regard themselves as the weaker vessel.”13 He was also a strong supporter, along with his wife, Ella, of women’s suffrage.14
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PERHAPS THE LOUDEST, and most famous, medical advice he offered was on avoiding the “death sentence” of meat consumption. In Dr. Kellogg’s opinion, meat was poisonous, disease-producing, and nearly impossible for the gut to digest. Although he had proffered this advice since he began practicing medicine, by the early 1900s he was applying the latest bacteriological concepts to illustrate how ingested “animal flesh” putrified in the gut, facilitating the reproduction of dangerous “protein loving bacteria” emitting all kinds of toxins, some of which “possess a degree of virulence or activity surpassing even that of the venoms of poisonous reptiles.” The results of a meaty diet, he argued, were severe intestinal stasis, constipation, autointoxication, atherosclerosis, cancer, liver and kidney failure, gallstones, obesity, arthritis, hypertension, and many other dreaded maladies.15
The doctor was brilliant at using visual aids to make his points graphic, gross—and lasting. On many evenings, he took out a sharp knife and sliced off a thin piece of beefsteak obtained from Battle Creek’s finest restaurant, the Post Tavern. He then carefully stained and affixed it to a glass slide and placed it under the microscope, which was hooked up to a lantern-slide projector for all to see on a large screen. What appeared, he explained, was a sea of disease-yielding microbes, “420 million in a little piece not as big as your thumb.”16 These germs, Dr. Kellogg warned, originated from the guts of the livestock or were parasites, such as trichinosis in pork and tapeworm found in tainted beef.
“What is the difference,” he asked a rapt audience in October of 1910, “whether it be beef
steak rotting in the butcher shop, and then you swallow it first, or whether you let it become rotten and decay after you swallow it?”17 His warnings resonated loudly in an era when health inspections of meat, dairy, and other food products were still rudimentary, at best, and everyone in the room knew someone (if not themselves) who had contracted typhoid fever, cholera, tuberculosis, and any number of diarrheal diseases from ingesting tainted water, meat, eggs, and dairy products.
At other lecture sessions, John ceremoniously removed a white cloth to unveil a Mason jar containing a pickled beefsteak. Dr. Kellogg began using this odd exhibit sometime in 1909. In his laboratory one night, he placed a fresh cut of steak into a jar filled with yogurt buttermilk, screwed on the top tightly, and put it in a cupboard. Over the next several years, he hauled out the jar for a scintillating lecture exhibit. Each time, John sliced off a piece of the beef. Putting this specimen under the microscope he demonstrated that even when properly pickled, the meat still putrefied, giving rise to billions of disease-causing microbes.18
By far Dr. Kellogg’s most legendary presentation of the principle “you are what you eat” supposedly involved his asking an assistant to wheel in an ironclad cage containing a wolf, snarling and glaring at the alarmed audience. Reassuring the crowd that the bars were solid and secure, he told how he found this wolf as a puppy on the Sanitarium’s expansive grounds. He took it home and fed it nothing but vegetables, whole grains, and nuts. The wolf grew so docile that John and Ella Kellogg encouraged their adopted wards to frolic with it in their backyard. Everything changed, however, as soon as the doctor reintroduced the canine beast to a bit of beefsteak. The animal’s wolflike and carnivorous instincts kicked in and the doctor had little choice but to imprison the wolf back into a cage.
Making the wolf snarl by holding a piece of red meat tantalizingly close to it yet still out of reach, he warned his audience, those who ate animals soon began to behave like them. Citing his favorite “flesh abstainers of all ages, from Pythagoras and Seneca to Shelley, Lord Byron, Tolstoi and Bernard Shaw,” Dr. Kellogg intoned: “flesh-eating, with the slaughter-house and other cruelties which it involves as a part of the civilized man’s environments, tends to foster and maintain in him the brutal qualities which are manifested in the barbarities and cruelties of war.”19 Equally compelling, Dr. Kellogg expressed concerns about the wasted energy and resources spent on raising cattle and pork when compared to the energy and costs expended for grain and vegetable production.20
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MEAT WAS HARDLY Dr. Kellogg’s only gastronomic enemy; his most comical foes originated from the sea. For years, John waged war on oysters, be they raw, stewed, fried, or lightly sautéed. With purple prose and bacteriological gore, Dr. Kellogg warned:
The oyster dwells in the slime and ooze of the ocean bottom. His business is to filter through his beard or gills the filthy water in which he thrives best, collecting and feeding upon millions of germs which swarm in the slime which covers the weeds and stones scattered over the ocean bottom….Oyster juice contains more than one hundred million germs, mostly colon germs, to the ounce…it contains more filth germs than does sewage.21
In 1931, Dr. Kellogg’s hostility to the bivalve proved so damaging to the oyster industry along Chesapeake Bay that the Maryland state legislature formally censured the doctor and his brother’s cereal company for “libeling the oyster.” Dr. Kellogg immediately sent out a press release entitled “A Tempest in an Oyster Pot,” which defended his brother’s firm as well as “anybody in Battle Creek or Michigan.” None of these good people, he declared, had anything to do with his medical declarations. Yet he could not help rubbing more cocktail sauce into the wound:
To call the oyster a scavenger is no libel. It is merely the statement of a biologic fact; and Maryland legislators, astute politicians although they may be, by resolution or in any other way, cannot change or camouflage the fact. The oyster cannot live without filth.22
Parenthetically, one of Will’s favorite meals was a heaping dish of oyster stew. On many nights, after a long day toiling in the San, he walked downtown and dropped into Webb’s restaurant. After greeting the owner and his waitress, he tied a napkin around his neck and, within minutes of arrival, tucked into a big bowl of the creamy stuff. The doctor’s wife, Ella, wanted to fire her brother-in-law for committing the culinary equivalent of a capital offense. Such hostility terrified Will, largely because until he struck out on his own as a cereal maker, he felt entirely reliant on his brother’s goodwill for keeping his job. When confronted by John, Will dutifully confessed and resolved to give up the delicacy, which he did for a period of time, followed by a lapse and then a relapse at Webb’s. The final act involved enduring still another confrontation over his hunger for seafood and his version of a mea culpa.23 Will never gave up his fondness for shellfish. For the rest of his life, he told many over the years, he “could hardly wait for months having the letter ‘r’ so that oysters would be in season.”24
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BEYOND THE LECTURES, activities, and meals, an extra special part of the “San experience” were visits by luminous stars of the American scene now forgotten but whose names and deeds glittered brightly in their day. Celebrity endorsements of the Sanitarium were good for John’s business and even better for his professional reputation. Throughout much of his career, he sent out free samples of his health foods along with personally handwritten notes to a long slate of famous authors, politicians, actors, and socialites. In all these letters he made certain to ask after their health, followed by effusive compliments on their recent work, activity, or business success, on which he kept as close a watch as he did the latest advances in the medical literature.
He closed the deal by inviting these celebrities to stay at the San, free of charge, whenever they could spare the time. It was a brilliant marketing tool and the paying guests, of course, ate it up. For example, Eddie Cantor, the popular star of stage, screen, and radio, enjoyed playing golf with Dr. Kellogg while the comedian’s wife, Ida, and their five daughters shed pounds in the exercise rooms. Cantor literally sang for his supper as he entertained in the Parlor, gamboling up and down the aisles, warbling “If You Knew Susie (Like I Know Susie!)” and, perhaps to appease his beleaguered wife, the lilting “Ida, Sweet as Apple Cider.”
Another frequent guest was Johnny Weissmuller, the Olympic gold medalist (for his swimming) and star of the popular “Tarzan of the Jungle” movies. The actor’s legendary jungle yodel opened many a meal in the San’s dining room when he was in residence. Dr. Charles E. Welch, the dentist who took over his father’s Concord grape juice business, lectured at the San thirty-two times. The Welch family’s processed fruit juice, the first of its kind, was sold as a nonalcoholic alternative for churchgoing teetotalers until the dentist introduced it at the 1893 World’s Columbian Exposition and grape juice became a wildly popular health drink. Leonard W. Bonney, the pioneering aviator who worked for the Wright brothers, put one of their famous “aeroplanes” through its paces just above the San in 1911, an event that patients spoke about for years.25 During the late 1920s, Amelia Earhart spent several days at the San as John’s personal guest. To show her gratitude, the aviatrix took Dr. Kellogg up in the sky for his first airplane ride. The ten-minute journey afforded the doctor a breathtaking bird’s-eye view of the San’s campus and Battle Creek.26
In March of 1924, Count Ilya Lvovich Tolstoy, the writer and son of the famed Russian novelist of War and Peace, entertained the audience with stories about his father’s vegetarianism and how his avoidance of alcohol and tobacco led to his literary productivity and ripe old age.27 Dr. Kellogg revered the novelist and had met him during his 1907 trip to Russia. John loved quoting a letter he once received from Tolstoy stating that “although he didn’t have time to read every number of Good Health, he always looked at it, and he approved very heartily of its teachings.” Tolstoy met and married a beautiful woman in 1907 who loved meat and, as he confessed to Dr. Kellogg, he returned to �
��flesh-eating” in order to avoid “domestic infelicity and continual contention at home.”28
Over the years, a parade of luminaries presented lectures in the San Parlor or graced the place with their presence in exchange for their free Battle Creek holidays.29 This list included the African American educator Booker T. Washington; former first lady Mary Todd Lincoln; botanist Luther Burbank; the Reverend Billy Sunday; national parks chief Gifford Pinchot; tennis star Bill Tilden; Congressman Joseph Cannon; business moguls Harvey Firestone, J. C. Penney, Montgomery Ward, S. S. Kresge, and Alfred duPont; pianist José Iturbi; conductor and composer John Philip Sousa; and broadcaster Lowell Thomas.30
The visits of celebrities to the San were reported in the in-house weekly newspaper, The Sanitarium News, and the San’s monthly magazine, The Battle Creek Idea. The arrival of such special guests was widely announced in the dining room and to all the local newspapers and national magazines. More than one wag quipped that Dr. Kellogg’s medical specialty was “diseases of the rich and famous.” Yet these men and women did far more than add to the cachet or excitement of staying at the Battle Creek Sanitarium. Their medical care at the San provides both a fascinating look at the health of some of America’s most prominent citizens and illustrates many of the common ills John diagnosed and treated every day at the San. Perhaps the best way to begin such an exploration would be to focus on Dr. Kellogg’s “medical partnership” with the greatest industrialist of the day.31
Like many celebrities, John Philip Sousa performed at the San in return for a free stay. Credit 74
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HENRY FORD BECAME A lifelong adherent to Dr. Kellogg’s “biologic living” beginning in the early 1900s. A resident of Dearborn, Michigan, about 115 miles east of Battle Creek, the “king of the flivvers” and his wife, Clara, were frequent guests at the Sanitarium. Always graceful in his movements, Ford’s favorite activity at the San was leading the guests in evening square dances.32 Ford’s vitality, physique, daily diet, and even his exercise regimen were widely reported in the popular press. In an interview with Redbook magazine in 1935, Ford opined, “Most wrong acts committed by men are the result of the wrong mixtures in the stomach.”33 Directly channeling Dr. Kellogg, Henry Ford publicly denounced the consumption of sugar, excessive starch, coffee and tea, liquor, and red meat.
The Kelloggs Page 25