Part of the exercise regimen at the San.
This Week in Odd History, Dr. John Harvey Kellogg dished up the first serving of corn flakes at the Battle Creek Sanitarium, known affectionately as the San. These were not the corn flakes that have since adorned breakfast tables around the world. (Those would not make their appearance until 1906, when Dr. Kellogg’s brother, Will Keith Kellogg, added sugar to the recipe and began marketing them as a breakfast food. Dr. Kellogg so thoroughly disapproved of this development that he sued Will in a fruitless attempt to keep the Kellogg name off of mass-produced breakfast cereals.) These were an unsweetened addition to the diets of Dr. Kellogg’s patients, who suffered from a variety of ailments that Dr. Kellogg believed could be cured by a strict vegetarian diet, vigorous exercise, sexual abstinence, and regular enemas.
The San, like its director, offered up a strange mix of solid medical thinking and superstitious quackery. Dr. Kellogg was a fervent Seventh-Day Adventist, although he and the church would eventually part ways over his increasing insistence upon running all of the church’s medical facilities, and over the “strange doctrines” which he had begun to teach. He took over the Sanitarium when he was 24, a newly minted doctor whose medical training had been partially financed by two of the founding members of the Adventist Church, James and Ellen White, and he embraced the religion’s approach to healthy living.
The front entrance of the San, circa 1912. Image by UpNorth Memories, used under a Creative Commons license.
The Whites had been running a Health Reform Institute in Battle Creek, Michigan, where hydrotherapy (the practice of dunking the patient, or various parts of the patient, into cold water) was offered. They had done moderately well, but neither of them was either a physician or a business person. Dr. Kellogg was both. He renamed the Health Reform Institute, using the British term “Sanitarium” to describe its focus on modern medical treatment. Hydrotherapy remained a staple of the therapeutic menu, but he continually added new treatments, many of his own invention. He welcomed new technologies, too, from radium therapy to Fletcherization (chewing food until it dissolves; he later abandoned Fletcherization when he decided that it destroyed wholesome fiber). He also pioneered new forms of abdominal surgery, with remarkably low mortality rates.
Dr. Kellogg was, first and foremost, a physician. He traveled the world to advance his medical knowledge, and belonged to a number of medical societies. He was ahead of his time in many respects. He wrote about the dangers of smoking years before the Surgeon General issued any warnings, and he attempted a number of innovative surgeries. When Sojourner Truth came to the San in 1883, suffering from ulcers on her legs, Dr. Kellogg reportedly grafted some of his own skin onto her body. Many of his writings about food and health also demonstrate his devotion to science. Unfortunately, they also reveal his lapses in scientific judgment. In his essay about pork, for instance, he correctly identifies the pig as a carrier of trichinosis and tape worms, and describes the microscopic appearance of these parasites in the meat. However, he also insists that the high body fat of swine is due to the toxic corruption which builds up in their tissues, until it is deposited under the skin as fat.
One of Dr. Kellogg's healthful inventions - the Mechanical Camel. Image courtesy of Mike Bramble.
Such toxic corruption was one of Dr. Kellogg’s obsessions. He insisted that the bowel and the stomach were the source of 90% of all illness, and that as toxins built up in the bowel (a condition he referred to as “autointoxication,” caused by eating meat, drinking alcohol and coffee, smoking, overindulging in sex or spicy foods, and any number of other disagreeable activities), the rest of the body’s systems would begin to fail. The high-fiber diet at the San was designed to clear out the bowels, as was the daily enema regimen to which his patients were subjected. He was particularly concerned about “intestinal flora,” and so he fed each patient half a pint of yogurt after each enema, and administered the other half pint via another enema. If the patient’s condition still failed to improve, Dr. Kellogg would simply remove a portion of the intestine. He might do upwards of 20 such procedures per day.
If the enemas and the yogurt and the corn flakes and the surgeries failed to improve the patient’s condition, Dr. Kellogg had another idea about what was wrong with them. They were masturbators. Kellogg abhorred sex, and particularly masturbation, nearly as much as he despised clogged colons. Masturbation, according to Dr. Kellogg, caused sleeplessness, eating disorders and acne. He devoted 97 pages of his 664-page treatise on sex, Plain Facts for Old and Young, to what he called “The Secret Vice.” He also suggested a cure: “A remedy which is almost always successful in small boys,” he wrote, “is circumcision… The operation should be performed by a surgeon without administering an anesthetic, as the brief pain attending the operation will have a salutary effect upon the mind… In females, the author has found the application of pure carbolic acid to the clitoris an excellent means of allaying the abnormal excitement.” It is perhaps telling that the good doctor composed a good deal of this book while on his honeymoon. Although he was married, the marriage was never consummated. He and his wife kept separate apartments throughout their lives. Dr. Kellogg maintained that this was due to the deleterious effect of sexual activity upon physical health, but some commentators have speculated that he was either impotent, possibly as the result of mumps, or that he was a klismaphiliac, preferring enemas to intercourse.
Dr. Kellogg poses with a friend.
Despite icy baths in radium-infused water and bone-jarring rides on the vibratory chair, most of the patients who came to the San did improve. This was due, in large part, to Dr. Kellogg’s careful selection of his patients. The seriously ill were almost never admitted. If they were, he released them before their conditions proved fatal. (Sojourner Truth died at home several months after her stay at the San.) His patients suffered from the diseases of the rich – obesity, overwork, and boredom. It may be a testament to the efficacy of Dr. Kellogg’s “biological living” that he himself lived to be 91. On the other hand, it may be only a testament to his genetic makeup. His brother Will lived to be 91, as well.
Featured image by Up North Memories – Donald “Don” Harrison.
Sources:
DTs Today in All Kinds of History (Archived)
Christian Science Monitor: What’s for Breakfast?
Biography of Dr. Kellogg at the Kellogg Community Foundation
Dr. J. H. Kellogg Discovery Center, from the Adventist Heritage Ministry (Archived: The current site is here, but no longer seems to contain any information about Dr. Kellogg.)
Great American Quacks: The Museum of Questionable Medical Devices
Sojourner’s Years in Battle Creek
Pork – Or the Dangers of Pork-Eating Exposed, by J.H. Kellogg, MD
It always amazes me how many people think that sex in and of itself is the root of all evil, when it’s actually, well, the root of all human life (well, mostly anyway). If every single person lived the way he did, the species would be in the last stages of going extinct!
An amazing post! I lived near Battle Creek for years. It is a shame that most historical tours associated with the Kellogs plant and Kellog the person have been seemingly forever “suspended.” I always wanted to tour those places.