The Kelloggs

by Howard Markel

30. Madge E. Pickard and R. Carlyle Buley, The Midwest Pioneer: His Ills, Cures and Doctors (New York: Henry Schuman, 1946), p. 13; Edgar W. Martin, The Standard of Living in 1860: American Consumption Levels on the Eve of the Civil War (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1942), p. 226.

  31. R. H. Shryock, Medicine and Society in America, 1660–1860 (New York: NYU Press, 1960), pp. 44–81; R. H. Shryock, Medical Licensing in America, 1650–1965 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1967), pp. 3–76; Martin, The Standard of Living in 1860, pp. 220–47.

  32. The doctor’s therapeutic armamentarium, circa 1840, changed very little since the age of Hippocrates (c. 460 to 370 BC). There were, of course, a few notable exceptions: during the seventeenth century, Western physicians and Jesuit missionaries began prescribing cinchona or Peruvian bark and, later, quinine for malaria. In 1785, the British physician William Withering began using an extract of a flowering plant called foxglove, or digitalis, as a treatment for “dropsy,” or congestive heart failure. By the early 1800s, Edward Jenner’s smallpox vaccine was well known, but it remained a controversial technique that many avoided as assiduously as the disease it was developed to prevent.

  33. Charles Rosenberg, “The Therapeutic Revolution: Medicine, Meaning and Social Change in 19th Century America,” in M. Vogel and C. E. Rosenberg, eds., The Therapeutic Revolution: Essays in the Social History of Medicine (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1979), pp. 1–25.

  34. Pickard and Buley, The Midwest Pioneer, pp. 103–8; LeRoy G. Davis, “Frontier Home Remedies and Sanitation,” Minnesota History, 1938; 19(4): 369–76.

  35. Vis medicatrix naturae is the Latin translation of this Greek aphorism. Max Neuberger, “An Historical Survey of the Concept of Nature from a Medical Standpoint,” Isis, 1944; 35(1): 16–28; W. F. Bynum, “Nature’s Helping Hand,” Nature, 2011; 414:21; G. M. A. Grube, “Greek Medicine and the Greek Genius,” Phoenix, 1954; 8(4): 123–35.

  36. J. C. Whorton, Crusaders for Fitness: The History of American Health Reformers (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1982), pp. 22–24, 35–37; Stephen Nissenbaum, Sex, Diet and Debility in Jacksonian America: Sylvester Graham and Health Reform (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1980).

  37. As a point of comparison, in 2000 the U.S. infant mortality rate was about 5.3 per 1,000 live births for non-Hispanic white babies, 12.2 per 1,000 live births for non-Hispanic black babies, and 5.4 per 1,000 live births for Hispanic babies; most of these babies died of complications related to prematurity. Table Ab1–10: Fertility and Mortality, by Race, 1800–2000, in S. B. Carter, S. S. Gartner, M. R. Haines, A. L. Olmstead, R. Sutch, and G. Wright, eds., Historical Abstracts of the United States. Earliest Times to Present. Millennial Edition. Volume 1. Part A, Population (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2006), pp. 1–391.

  38. Irvine Loudon, “The Measurement of Maternal Mortality,” Journal of the History of Medicine and Allied Sciences, 1999; 54: 312–29. See also Robert J. Gordon, The Rise and Fall of American Growth (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2016), pp. 35–36, 50–51.

  39. Pickard and Buley, The Midwest Pioneer, 110–11.

  40. Schwarz, John Harvey Kellogg, p. 10.

  41. The discussion of trachoma is drawn from Markel, When Germs Travel, pp. 86–87.

  42. Calomel chemically transforms the bile pigment bilirubin into biliverdin, which in turn changes the stool from its typical brown color into an emerald green. Herman Sahli, Francis P. Kinnicutt, and Nathanial B. Potter, A Treatise on Diagnostic Methods of Examination (Authorized Translation from the 4th Revised and Enlarged German Edition) (Philadelphia: W. B. Saunders Co., 1909), pp. 424–25; “Influence of Calomel Upon the Decomposition of Bile,” American Journal of Pharmacy, 1887; 59: 444.

  43. This discussion of tuberculosis is drawn from Markel, When Germs Travel, pp. 24–31.

  44. Merritt G. Kellogg, “A Bit of Family History” (typescript dated July 6, 1914), Reel 1, Image 20, p. 4, J. H. Kellogg Papers, U-M; James Copland, The Forms, Complications, Causes, Prevention and Treatment of Consumption and Bronchitis Comprising Also the Causes and Prevention of Scrofula (London: Longman, Green, Longman and Roberts, 1861), pp. 415–16.

  45. Powell, pp. 11–12, quote is from p. 11.

  46. Merritt G. Kellogg, “A Bit of Family History” (typescript dated July 6, 1914), Reel 1, Images 17–44, page 7, Image 23, J. H. Kellogg Papers, U-M.

  47. Powell, pp. 11–12.

  48. Ibid.; Schwarz, John Harvey Kellogg, p. 10; Merritt G. Kellogg, “A Bit of Family History” (typescript dated July 6, 1914), Reel 1, pp. 6–7, J. H. Kellogg Papers, U-M.

  49. The story of Mr. Kellogg’s foot injury, including all the quotations from the conversations he recalled, is drawn from Merritt Kellogg, “A Bit of Family History,” Reel 1, pp. 17–19 (Images 34–35). Merritt also suffered an ax wound to the foot, which resulted in “being laid up three weeks with this cut.” Ann Janette cared for him as “if I had been her own son,” Reel 1, p. 11, Image 27.

  2.

  THE CHOSEN ONE

  1. For extended genealogies of the Kellogg family, see Timothy Hopkins, The Kelloggs in the Old World and the New, Volume 1 (San Francisco: Sunset Press, 1903), p. 636; and in Volume 2, pp. 1315–20.

  2. Merritt G. Kellogg, “A Bit of Family History” (typescript dated July 6, 1914), Images 17–44. See, especially, Reel 1, Image 41, p. 25, J. H. Kellogg Papers, U-M.

  3. Ibid., p. 25, Image 41.

  4. “Dedication of the Portrait of Ann J. Kellogg. The Life and Influence of Ann J. Kellogg,” Reel 31, Images 461–76, J. H. Kellogg Papers.

  5. Merritt G. Kellogg, “A Bit of Family History” (typescript dated July 6, 1914), Reel 1, Images 17–44, J. H. Kellogg Papers, U-M. At various times, the well’s bucket rope would break and have to be retrieved. Mr. Kellogg took the treacherous step of going down into the well, much to Ann Janette’s discomfort and fear (pp. 26–27, Images 42–43).

  6. Schwarz, John Harvey Kellogg, pp. 10–11.

  7. Merritt G. Kellogg, “A Bit of Family History” (typescript dated July 6, 1914), Reel 1, Images 17–44, p. 27, Image 43, J. H. Kellogg Papers, U-M.

  8. “Dedication of the Portrait of Ann J. Kellogg. The Life and Influence of Ann J. Kellogg,” Reel 31, Images 461–76, J. H. Kellogg Papers, U-M.

  9. Merritt G. Kellogg, “A Bit of Family History” (typescript dated July 6, 1914), Reel 1, Image 27, p. 11, J. H. Kellogg Papers, U-M.

  10. William G. McLoughlin, “Revivalism,” in Edwin S. Gaustad, ed., The Rise of Adventism: A Commentary on the Social and Religious Ferment of Mid-Nineteenth Century America (New York: Harper & Row, 1974), pp. 119–50, quote is from p. 138.

  11. Everett M. Dick, “The Millerite Movement, 1830–1845,” in Gary Land, ed., Adventism in America (Berrien Springs, MI: Andrews University Press, 1998), pp. 1–28.

  12. Henry David Thoreau, “Economy,” in Henry David Thoreau, edited by Michael Meyer, Walden and Civil Disobedience, and Other Essays (New York: Penguin, 1983), p. 50. Regarding the term “Burnt-over District,” Charles Grandison Finney, the minister and later president of Oberlin College, found it difficult to find people to evangelize, especially while traveling through central and western New York after the occurrence of the “Great Disappointment.” In his memoirs, Finney referred to the region as a “burnt district” because “there had been, a few years previously, a wild excitement, which they called a revival of religion but which turned out to be spurious.” Charles G. Finney, The Memoirs of Rev. Charles G. Finney (New York: A. S. Barnes and Co., 1876), p. 78.

  13. Timothy L. Smith, “Social Reform,” in Gaustad, ed., The Rise of Adventism, pp. 18–29.

  14. Carson, p. 88; Richardson L. Wright, Hawkers and Walkers in Early America: Strolling Peddlers, Preachers, Lawyers, Doctors, Players, and Others. From the Beginning to the Civil War (Philadelphia: J. B. Lippincott, 1927), p. 64.

  15. Washington Gardner, The History of Calhoun County, Michigan: A Narrative Account of Its Historical Progress, Its People,
and Its Principal Interests, Volume 1 (Chicago and New York: The Lewis Publishing Company, 1913), pp. 82–93, 311–52. John H. Kellogg was an associate editor of this book and a long chapter is devoted to the Battle Creek Sanitarium, pp. 369–93.

  16. Powell, p. 16.

  17. Schwarz, John Harvey Kellogg, p. 13.

  18. Merritt G. Kellogg, “A Bit of Family History” (typescript dated July 6, 1914), Reel 1, Images 17–44, J. H. Kellogg Papers, U-M; A. S. Bloese Manuscript, Chapter 1, “Early Days,” unpaginated, Box 1, File 13; Schwarz, John Harvey Kellogg, p. 11; Gardner, The History of Calhoun County, Michigan, pp. 82–93. Gardner, a member of the Republican Party, was the U.S. congressman for the 3rd District of Michigan from 1889 to 1911. The history of the Underground Railroad that John H. Kellogg would have likely read would be Wilbur Siebert, The Underground Railroad: From Slavery to Freedom (New York: The Macmillan Co., 1898), Appendix E, p. 412, where, interestingly, John Preston is not named as one of the “operators” in Calhoun County, Michigan, in the alphabetical listing that ends this book.

  19. For example, in 1847, a runaway slave named Adam Crosswhite from nearby Marshall made national headlines. Crosswhite and his family had been living there openly since fleeing Kentucky in 1843. Their former master, Francis Giltner, discovered his whereabouts and, in January 1847, hired a team of slave hunters to seize Mr. Crosswhite. More than two hundred enraged townspeople, led by a banker named Charles T. Gorham, gathered together, freed Crosswhite from his pursuers, and helped him, his wife, and their children escape to Canada (although in 1878, they returned to settle in Marshall). The people of Marshall went one step further by demanding that the slave hunters be arrested for assault and breaking and entering. In turn, the aggrieved slave owner filed a lawsuit against Gorham, who was subsequently ordered by the court to pay Giltner $4,800 (about $142,000 in 2016). Many historians of American slavery ascribe the congressional passage of the restrictive 1850 Fugitive Slave Act to the Crosswhite case. Others have suggested this sorry episode made its way onto the pages of Harriet Beecher Stowe’s influential 1852 novel, Uncle Tom’s Cabin, and that the character George Harris (Eliza’s husband and a runaway slave) was loosely based on Adam Crosswhite. Writers Program of the Works Projects Administration in the State of Michigan, Michigan: A Guide to the Wolverine State (New York: Oxford University Press, 1941), pp. 401–2; Harriet Beecher Stowe, Uncle Tom’s Cabin, Or Life Among the Lowly (New York: Modern Library, 1938); Willis F. Dunbar and George S. May, Michigan: A History of the Wolverine State (Grand Rapids, MI: William B. Eerdmans, 1995, 3rd revised edition), pp. 304–5.

  20. Charles E. Barnes, “Battle Creek as a Station on the Underground Railway,” in Gardner, The History of Calhoun County, Michigan, pp. 82–87, quote is from p. 83.

  21. Writers Program of the Work Projects Administration in the State of Michigan, Michigan: A Guide to the Wolverine State (New York: Oxford University Press, 1941), p. 193.

  22. Battle Creek News and Enquirer, June 12, 1932, p. 1. For a similar account, see Charles MacIvor, “The Lord’s Physician,” manuscript of an unpublished biography of J. H. Kellogg, Chapter 37, “Sojourner Truth,” pp. 2–3, Charles MacIvor Collection, No. 251, Box 10, File 12, Chapters 31–47, Center for Adventist Research (hereafter Charles MacIvor, “The Lord’s Physician”).

  23. Nell Irvin Painter, Sojourner Truth: A Life, a Symbol (New York: W. W. Norton, 1996), pp. 148, 254; Battle Creek News and Enquirer, June 12, 1932, p. 1; Sojourner Truth, edited by Nell Irvin Painter, Narrative of Sojourner Truth (New York: Penguin, 1998), pp. 156, 228–43.

  24. Maintaining a public face of humility, Dr. Kellogg concluded that he did not amount to much. “Helpers Meeting, September 2, 1908, Full Meeting Minutes,” Reel 11, Images 118–37; see Image 125, J. H. Kellogg Papers.

  25. Letter from J. H. Kellogg to H. C. Sherman, June 4, 1935, Reel 3, Images 945–54, quote is from p. 4, Image 949, J. H. Kellogg Papers, U-M.

  26. A. S. Bloese Manuscript, p. 55, Box 1, Folder 13.

  27. Bound Scrapbooks of J. H. Kellogg, Student Notebooks in German, Mathematics, Poetry and Literature, Reel 37, Images 984–1261, J. H. Kellogg Papers, U-M.

  28. Schwarz, John Harvey Kellogg, p. 14.

  29. A. S. Bloese Manuscript, p. 37, Box 1, Folder 13.

  30. Ibid., pp. 36–37, Box 1, File 13.

  31. Ibid., p. 52, Box 1, File 13; Schwarz, PhD thesis, p. 12.

  32. A. S. Bloese Manuscript, p. 49.

  33. MacIvor Manuscript, Chapter 5, “Early Influences”; Schwarz, John Harvey Kellogg, pp. 9–16; A. S. Bloese Manuscript, “Early Days,” Box 1, File 13.

  34. “Sugar,” July 29, 1909, Reel 11, Images 659–75, J. H. Kellogg Papers, U-M.

  35. A. S. Bloese Manuscript, pp. 21–43. Box 1, File 13. Schwarz, PhD thesis, p. 12.

  36. Ronald Numbers, Prophetess of Health: A Study of Ellen G. White (Grand Rapids, MI: William G. Eerdmans, 2008, 3rd edition), pp. 276–90. Numbers provides a useful appendix of the physical and psychological experiences of Ellen G. White, “related in her own words,” pp. 291–319.

  37. Ibid., pp. 175–83; Harvey Green, Fit for America: Health, Fitness, Sport (New York: Pantheon, 1986), p. 135.

  38. Carson, p. 28. See also Andrew F. Smith, Eating History: Thirty Turning Points in the Making of American Cuisine (New York: Columbia University Press, 2009), pp. 141–54.

  39. Mose Velsor (Walt Whitman), “Manly Health and Training, with Off-Hand Hints Toward Their Conditions,” ed. Zachary Turpin, Walt Whitman Quarterly Review, 2016; 33: 184–310. (Velsor was one of Whitman’s favorite pen names.) Although Whitman thought meat was an important component of a healthy diet, he was, like John Harvey Kellogg’s mother, an avid reader of Russell Trall’s Water Cure Journal.

  40. Carson, p. 31.

  41. Robert. J. Gordon, The Rise and Fall of American Growth (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2016), pp. 39–40.

  42. Carson, pp. 28–42, quote is from p. 37. See also W. O. Huston, “The American Disease,” Columbus Medical Journal, 1896; 16: 1–6; J. C. Whorton, Crusaders for Fitness: The History of American Health Reformers (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1982); J. H. Baron and A. Sonnenberg, “Hospital Admissions for Peptic Ulcer and Indigestion in London and New York in the 19th and Early 20th Centuries,” Gut, 2002; 50: 568–70.

  43. Merritt G. Kellogg, “A Bit of Family History” (typescript dated July 6, 1914), Reel 1, Image 22 (page 6 in typescript), J. H. Kellogg Papers, U-M.

  44. A. S. Bloese Manuscript, pp. 48–49, Box 1, File 13.

  45. Carson, p. 37.

  3.

  NEW BROOMS SWEEP CLEAN

  1. William Alexander Alcott (1798–1859) recommended diets of simply prepared vegetables and unleavened bread, accompanied only with water. He stressed the importance of personal and sexual cleanliness through daily baths and vows of abstinence. See William Alcott, Vegetable Diet as Sanctioned by Medical Men and by Experience in All Ages (Boston: Marsh, Capen and Lyon, 1838); William Alcott, The Young Man’s Guide (Boston: Perkins and Marvin, 1838, 12th edition); William Alcott, Tea and Coffee (Boston: G. W. Light, 1839); William Alcott, The Laws of Health; or the Sequel to “The House I Live In” Designed for Families and Schools (Boston: John P. Jewett and Co., 1859).

  2. Ronald Numbers, Prophetess of Health: A Study of Ellen G. White (Grand Rapids, MI: William B. Eerdmans, 2008, 3rd edition), pp. 95–126; Ellen G. White, Health, or How to Live (Battle Creek, MI: Steam Press, 1865).

  3. A. S. Bloese Manuscript, pp. 67–68, Box 1, File 13.

  4. Sylvester Graham, A Treatise on Bread and Bread-Making (Boston: Light and Stearns, 1837); Sylvester Graham, A Lecture to Young Men on Chastity: Intended Also for the Serious Consideration of Parents and Guardians (Boston: Light & Stearns, Crocker & Brewster, 1837); Sylvester Graham, Lecture on Epidemic Diseases Generally and Particularly the Spasmodic Cholera (Boston: David Campbell, 1838); Sylvester Graham, Lectures on the Science of Human Life (London: Horsell, Aldine Chambers, 1849). See also A. E. Foote, A De
fence of the Graham System of Living, or: Remarks on Diet and Regimen, Dedicated to the Rising Generation (New York: W. Applegate, 1835). For several superb secondary accounts of Graham and his colleagues, see Richard H. Shryock, “Sylvester Graham and the Popular Health Movement, 1830–1870,” Mississippi Valley Historical Review, 1931; 18(2): 172–83; H. E. Hoff and J. F. Fulton, “The Centenary of the First American Physiological Society Founded at Boston by William A. Alcott and Sylvester Graham,” Bulletin of the History of Medicine, 1937; 5(8): 687–722; M. V. Naylor, “Sylvester Graham,” Annals of Medical History, 1942; 4(3): 236–40; J. C. Whorton, Crusaders for Fitness: The History of American Health Reformers (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1982), pp. 38–61; J. C. Whorton, Nature Cures: The History of Alternative Medicine in America (New York: Oxford University Press, 2002), pp. 85–89; Charles Rosenberg, “Piety and Social Action: Some Origins of the American Public Health Movement,” in Charles E. Rosenberg, No Other Gods: On Science and American Thought (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1976), pp. 109–22; Jonathan Gunther Penner, “Public Speaking in the Health Reform Movement in the United States, 1863–1943,” PhD thesis in Speech and Theatre, Purdue University, 1962; Kare Iacobbo and Michael Iacobbo, Vegetarian America: A History (Westwood, CT: Praeger, 2004), pp. 15–70 (“Sylvester Graham, Grahamism and Grahamites”), 71–88 (“The American Vegetarian Society”), and 89–106 (“The Water Cures, Seventh-day Adventists and the Civil War”).

  5. James Whorton, Nature Cures: The History of Alternative Medicine in America (New York: Oxford University Press, 2002), p. 88.

  6. A. S. Bloese Manuscript, p. 61, Box 1, File 13.

  7. Schwarz, John Harvey Kellogg, p. 27; Catalogue of the Officers and Students of the Michigan State Normal College for 1870–1871 (Ypsilanti: Michigan State Normal College, 1871); Catalogue of the Officers and Students of the Michigan State Normal College for 1871–1872 and Register for Students (Ypsilanti: Michigan State Normal College, 1872), Burton Historical Collections, Detroit Public Library, Detroit, Michigan. This college is now known as Eastern Michigan University.