Matt MacNabb - A Secret History of Brands - The Dark and Twisted Beginnings of the Brand Names We Know and Love

The Kelloggs were so involved in the Adventist Church that they donated a portion of the proceeds from the sale of their home when they moved from Tyrone Township to Battle Creek to fund the Adventist Church when they moved their publishing activities from Rochester, New York, to Battle Creek. The Kellogg family may have been in financial support of the Church, but John Harvey took his involvement to a far deeper level.

The Adventist Church had only a handful of leaders who helped with its formation; two of the more prominent were James and Ellen G. White. The Whites were a major influencing force within the Adventist movement and the prophetic visions that Ellen White claimed to experience were frequent and taken as gospel, not only into how they should be living their lives and forming the religion, but sometimes even foretelling the future. Ellen’s visions moved those who followed the religion towards keeping their body pure by rejecting many drinks, such as alcohol, coffee, and even tea. The entire Adventist movement also became vegetarian, feeling that eating the flesh of animals was an unclean act that would further serve to harm their bodies. The main theme of the religion was to truly purify the body. The original hope was that if the followers made their bodies and minds as pure as possible, then it might invite the second coming of Jesus Christ. The Adventists explained away the Great Disappointment by deciding that they were too unclean to be in the presence of the Lord, so their great quest of purity was everything to them.

John Harvey Kellogg was the source of one of Ellen’s ‘visions’. Ellen White came to her husband and explained that she had experienced a vision from God, which revealed to her that John Harvey Kellogg would someday be a very important part of their movement. It was from this moment forward that the Whites and the Adventist movement began to invest heavily in John Harvey’s future, something that would change his life, and the world, forever.

In 1864 the 12-year-old John Harvey Kellogg officially began working for the Adventist church, printing and distributing propaganda pamphlets. James White took John Harvey under his wing and taught him the ins and outs of the church’s publishing venture. One of the primary subjects of the Adventist pamphlets was Ellen White’s articles on health and wellbeing. It was during this time that Kellogg would gain interest in the subject of the human body, since it was his job to set the type for the articles.

At the age of 14 John Harvey devoted himself to becoming a vegetarian, a vow that he would sustain for the rest of his life. That same year, on 5 September 1866, the Adventists opened a convalescent home, called the Western Health Reform Institute in Battle Creek. He didn’t know it at the time, but this moment would become integral in Kellogg’s life, because it was there that he would make his lasting mark on the world and start a whole new industry that still goes strong today.

In an effort to affirm and validate their beliefs, the Seventh Day leadership opted to begin sending select devoted young men within their movement to various schools for professional training in the medical field. The Whites personally chose John Harvey Kellogg to attend a five-month course at Dr Russell Trall’s Hygeio-Theraputic College in 1872. Russell Trall was a trained allopath (a doctor with traditional training) who advocated alternative medical practices over traditional medication. Instead of regarding the human body as a physiological system, he firmly believed that it was an entity belonging to, and governed by, God. He subscribed to the school of thought that illness would occur when the natural laws of God were broken, basically that the sickness of the body was directly connected to sickness of the spirit. Dr Trall’s Hygeio-Theraputic College wasn’t so much a medical school, but rather an institute where he started to teach the ways of homeopathy and the benefits of diet and lifestyle in health over medicine or legitimate medical practice. His college was very forward thinking for the time, as the first of its kind in America to allow women an equal chance to learn alongside men. In fact, his enrolment comprised of nearly one third women.

Kellogg attended the course for five months, but he came away unimpressed with the alternative practices such as hydrotherapy that were being used. The practices he was taught also included having the patient consume forty to fifty glasses of water per day, and cleansing their bodies with water both inside and out.

In the modern world it can take upwards of eight years to earn a medical degree in the United States, but in John Harvey’s day it wasn’t such a meticulous process. It took him only two years to earn his MD from Bellevue Hospital Medical School in New York in 1875. The Whites served yet again as John Harvey’s benefactors, loaning him the money to attend medical school. Dr Kellogg went on to spend time in London and Vienna after he obtained his medical degree, where he earned his surgical certification, learning the most updated techniques of the era. Surgery would remain a large part of the doctor’s career, as he would perform over 22,000 operations.

The Adventists Western Health Reform Institute wasn’t going as planned; with business failing, the Whites called upon their star protégé for help. Their decision to make John Harvey superintendent of the home in 1876 was a moment that changed history.

Dr Kellogg returned home to Battle Creek and brought a new level of confidence and self-assurance along with him. In his first acts as superintendent he wasted no time in expanding the facilities and changing the name to the Battle Creek Sanitarium. The new staff he brought in all had proper medical training; Dr Kellogg expected nothing but excellence from his staff. It was then that he began moulding the Battle Creek Sanitarium after his own ideas about wellness, opting to offer fewer and fewer services like hydrotherapy, and introduce more ‘modern’ techniques, which were a mixture of his heightened healthy-living programme and actual medical science.

Dr Kellogg wasn’t satisfied to simply run the Sanitarium, he sought complete control. He even began to manipulate and exploit Ellen White’s visions by implanting his own scheme, which Kellogg referred to as his ‘Battle Creek Idea’. It is said that he would implant his ideas in her mind while she was in a vulnerable trance state. Ellen would then repeat Kellogg’s ideas as though they were her own. This manipulation was one way that John Harvey moved things in the direction of his own vision. He also came to serve as editor for the Adventist Health Reformer newsletter, which had a focus on pushing the Adventist health propaganda. Kellogg would change the name of the newsletter to Good Health in 1879. Throughout his career and tenure at Battle Creek, Dr Kellogg also wrote and published more than fifty books. He was determined to get his ideas out to the world through any and all means necessary.

It was under John Harvey’s rule that the Sanitarium became a beacon of health and well-being and the largest of its kind in the world. ‘The San’, as it was commonly known, offered cures for all things that ailed you. It served as a cross between a getaway spa and a medical clinic. Guests were immediately x-rayed, probed, and thoroughly examined upon arrival, and then assigned a regimen of baths, massages, exercise and diet.

The American diet and lifestyle in the late nineteenth century was often excessively full of fat, causing many health concerns including stomach upsets, nervousness and indigestion (neurostenia and dyspepsia). The San had a vast regime of treatments for anything and everything that may have ailed you.