The Kelloggs Read online

  A great deal of the early nineteenth-century physician’s efforts was directed at pinpointing what imbalances existed, making a prognosis in terms of whether or not the patient would survive the illness in question, and prescribing chemical agents and herbs that supposedly increased or decreased the flow of the deficient or excessive humors, respectively. In reality, many of these drugs simply induced people to vomit, urinate, or defecate in staggeringly dangerous amounts. These physicians also prescribed toxic doses of mercury—or calomel—soporific doses of opium for pain, and strychnine and arsenic to “stimulate” weakened hearts.34 For inflammations, they often removed what was perceived to be excesses of blood by means of bloodletting. The actual results were far less sanguine in that draining massive amounts of blood only made a sick person sicker. All these interventions ran counter to Hippocrates’ sage advice (and one that John Harvey Kellogg would later echo): “Vis medicatrix naturae (Nature is the healer of disease).”35 Little wonder then that many Americans avoided doctors at all costs and simply treated themselves.36

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  ONE OF THE MOST common conditions demanding medical attention on the frontier was the act of delivering a baby. The main reason for such fruitful reproduction, beyond the paucity of effective contraception, was the fact that these pioneering families needed many children to help eke out a living from the land. Soon after settling in Michigan, in 1836, Mary Ann Kellogg gave birth to another son, Albert; two years later, 1838, a daughter named Julia Elvira was born; and in 1840 she delivered a second daughter, Martha.

  Typically assisted by other women settlers not always adept at midwifery, the act of giving birth on the frontier was fraught with complications and, too often, death. A trip through an old graveyard filled with those who died in the early nineteenth century reveals headstone after headstone announcing the premature death of infants and young children, often alongside their mothers who died during or soon after childbirth. Data on infant mortality rates in the United States for 1830 to 1840 are sparsely recorded but as early as 1850 the infant mortality rate for white babies was 216.8 per 1,000 live births per year and 340 per 1,000 live births for African American babies.37 By 1870, that key measure of a community’s health declined to a still problematic rate of 175.5 deaths per 1,000 white babies. Data on U.S. maternal mortality is even sparser during the nineteenth century, but as late as 1910, a far cry from life on the frontier, 6.9 mothers died per 1,000 births. The risk of a woman dying during childbirth increased markedly with each successive pregnancy and delivery. Using historical estimates from developed nations at this time, such as England, the maternal mortality rate in Michigan during the 1840s was at least double the 1910 figure and probably a good deal greater.38

  Moreover, the ruggedness of pioneer life failed to afford new mothers much time to recover from childbirth. These young women were locked into a seemingly unending cycle of pregnancy and delivery, followed by a few months of nursing the new infant and caring for the rest of the family, before the whole process began again, leaving many women depleted, exhausted, and in poor health while still in their twenties.39 Mary Ann Kellogg was an excellent example of this tragic life cycle. The combination of her unending household chores, the births of five children over eight years, poor nutrition, and what turned out to be a galloping case of consumption robbed her of youth and starkly numbered her days.

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  LONG BEFORE Mary Ann’s tuberculosis declared itself victorious, it was Mr. Kellogg who experienced the family’s most serious health threat. In the spring of 1838, he developed eye irritation and redness, which progressed to severe inflammation. The rims of his eyes and his eyelids swelled and turned beefy-red, and soon he complained of excessive tearing and blurred vision.40 At this far remove, it is impossible to make a definitive retrospective diagnosis but given the severity of the ailment, the length of his symptoms, the prevalence of infectious eye disease and poor hand washing and sanitation practices along the frontier, Mr. Kellogg was probably stricken with trachoma. No mere pink eye; for 75 percent of those infected, trachoma resulted in a slow and inexorable loss of vision, much like the closing of a window shade as the eyeball becomes a wasted battleground between the human being and the microbe. It was also quite contagious. When an infected person rubs his or her eyes (something we all do many times a day) and then touches or shakes hands with another, the infected person places the uninfected person at risk for contracting trachoma.41

  In the Michigan Territory of the 1830s, a family’s principal breadwinner becoming sightless signaled a calamity of stunning magnitude. How would the Kellogg farm continue to provide food and income if John Preston could not see where to plant his crops or raise his livestock? How would they travel unless Mrs. Kellogg learned to master their team of horses? Who would protect the family from danger? What help could they expect from a tiny community of striving pioneers who already had their hands full bringing food to their own tables and working their own struggling farms?

  Against John Preston’s wishes, Mary Ann contacted a doctor from Flint to come and examine her husband. The doctor prescribed “counter-irritation,” a therapy designed to “correct” severe inflammation in one part of the body by creating a source of inflammation somewhere else on the patient’s body. The prescriptive logic was that the new irritation would draw away the bad humors causing the inflammation, redistribute and equilibrate it, and thus restore humoral balance. There were several harsh chemical and physical means to induce counter-irritation but a favorite method in early nineteenth century America was the “fly blister.” Finding a suitable spot on the back of Mr. Kellogg’s neck, the doctor applied an unhealthy dose of finely ground “Spanish Fly,” which is actually derived from an emerald-green beetle. The beetle’s body produces a substance called cantharidin, a chemical so irritating to human skin that, even when applied in small doses, it rapidly raises an angry red and fluid-filled blister.

  John Preston’s doctor also prescribed the purgative calomel, or mercury chloride. He was given such a high dose that within days he was drooling like a rabid dog, unable to swallow the copious saliva he produced because his lips, gums, and tongue were so swollen. More alarming, his hair and teeth began falling out and he was constantly running to evacuate copious runny, emerald green stools. His doctor interpreted these symptoms as a clear sign that the calomel was working by increasing the bile flow of a “congested liver”; today, this constellation of symptoms would be easily recognized as acute mercury poisoning.42 None of these treatments helped and it was entirely possible they worsened Mr. Kellogg’s condition. Fortunately, the patriarch’s immune system was stronger than both the infection and the doctor’s treatment regimen. After several months of agony, John Preston’s eyes somehow emerged intact and healthy.

  Nevertheless, John Preston’s infirmity could not have occurred at a worse time for the family. Described as a cautious man loath to part with a hard-earned dollar, Mr. Kellogg was inexplicably persuaded to subscribe to a “solid investment” that proved nearly disastrous. A year before he took ill, in 1837, two friends and neighbors, Charles Haskell and Warner Lake, convinced Mr. Kellogg to sign a promissory note for $500 (about $13,100 in 2016) and a surety on their notes to establish the Bank of Genesee. Underfunded and poorly managed, the bank failed within a year, saddling Mr. Kellogg with $500 worth of personal debt, half of the investment share of his now bankrupt friend Warren Lake, and a banker’s fee of an additional 10 percent interest. This financial burden drained his pocketbook for the next ten years.

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  ONLY A FEW YEARS LATER, Mary Ann’s tuberculosis recrudesced with a vengeance. The Romans called it consumare, or consumption, from the Latin words “to eat up” or “to devour.” Indeed, this is precisely what active tuberculosis does; it consumes its victim with a passionate and incisive energy, inexorably devouring the structure of the lungs and other critical body organs, but typically not until its progeny have had the opportunity to travel to the lungs of another human
being to begin the same destructive process again.43 The microbe that causes tuberculosis, Mycobacterium tuberculosis, was not discovered until 1882, and in the early nineteenth century the very notion that a microscopic, living entity could fell a human being was laughable. Instead, the most commonly subscribed theory at this time was that tuberculosis was caused by a weak constitution and an imbalance of the humors.

  Mary Ann was likely infected with tuberculosis long before she ever got to Michigan but during the last four years of her life, 1837–1841, she experienced the disease at its worst. She may have also infected her husband and neighbors in the process. Her symptoms began with exhaustion, not an uncommon complaint for any hardworking pioneer woman. Soon enough, she experienced night sweats severe enough to drench her bed clothing along with unpredictable and scorching fevers. She became so incapacitated during the last four months of her life that she instructed her husband to hire Ann Janette Stanley, a teenaged daughter of a blacksmith living in nearby Threadville, to help maintain the household and look after her five young children while the mother awaited a painful, bloody, and suffocating death.

  Near the end of Mary Ann’s life, the local physician took to dosing her with a daily inhalation of the fumes of camphor and iodine resin placed on a shovel of hot coals. The doctor put the smoky, hot shovel near her nose and mouth and exhorted her to breathe as deeply as her injured lungs allowed.44 The smelly medication was thought to relieve chest tightness and coughing. Such palliative measures, if they worked at all, were certainly no match for the deadly tuberculosis microbes and on September 16, 1841, Mary Ann experienced a severe lung hemorrhage. When she regained consciousness, she instructed her husband, “Go to Ann Stanley, I want her and no one else.”45 Unfortunately, Ann Janette Stanley was working as a schoolteacher some twenty miles away in a new settlement called Shiawassee and could not leave her post until the end of the term. Over the next eleven days, Mary Ann experienced daily lung hemorrhages, growing weaker and weaker because of the copious loss of bright red blood. On September 27, Mary Ann Kellogg died. She was a few days short of turning thirty.

  Mr. Kellogg, like many a young widower on the frontier, knew that a mate had to be found quickly in order to protect his family and livelihood. Five weeks after Mary Ann’s funeral, John Preston hired a “very large and strong” sixteen-year-old girl named Miss Trickey to care for the home and children. As “the winter advanced,” the teenager began to neglect these tasks. John Preston berated the girl for her poor work but instead of improving her efforts, Miss Trickey packed up her belongings and went home.46 It was around this point when John Preston recalled his late wife’s dying advice about Ann Janette Stanley.

  The thirty-five-year-old John Preston managed to win the young woman over and they married the following March. Ann Janette Stanley was only eighteen years of age.47 Decades later, Merritt recalled the events of March 29, 1842, when he witnessed his father hitch up his team of horses. Before leaving John Preston told his eldest son, “I expect to bring someone home with me when I return.” Just before dusk on the same day, Smith heard the rattling noise of wheels and hoofbeats on the rough road leading to their log cabin. When the boy peered out the window, he saw his father’s wagon approaching. Smith exclaimed, “Father has come and he has got a woman in the wagon with him.” The Kellogg children ran out to welcome their father and were overjoyed to see that the woman was their beloved friend, Ann Janette Stanley. Merritt told Ann Janette, “I am awfully glad to see you.” Ann Janette replied, “So am I. I am glad to see you, Merritt, and you, Smith, and you, Albert, and you, Julia.” The young woman then picked up the toddler Martha, kissed her lovingly, and noted how much she had grown since last holding her. As he alighted from the wagon, John Preston decreed, “Children, you must not call her Ann. You must call her mother for she is your mother now.” Merritt asked Ann Janette if this was, indeed, the case. She gently replied, “I have come to be a mother to you all.” She reaffirmed her solemn promise with a kiss on the cheek of each of John Preston’s children. After unloading the wagon of her possessions, Ann Janette asked Merritt, “If you build a fire, I will get some supper.” Merritt later admitted it was the best possible solution to an awful set of circumstances and Ann Janette loved Mary Ann’s children as if they were her own.48

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  DURING THE WINTER of 1844, John Preston’s health was again seriously jeopardized. This time it was not a microbe calling but, instead, the errant swing of an ax while he was fencing in eighty acres of land to pasture his burgeoning collection of cows and oxen. Again we turn to Merritt Kellogg for a recollection of the events on the bitter cold January day he was walking home from school, down the section line road.49 Alarmed to find blood in the snow near where he had last seen Mr. Kellogg chopping wood, Merritt followed a bloody trail of scarlet red foot tracks leading all the way to the front of their home. At the door’s threshold, he found his pale, drawn, and nearly moribund father lying on the floor with a foot leaking out a pool of blood. Ann Janette struggled to stop the flow with ice-cold water and a rag acting as a makeshift tourniquet. Frightened but resolute, Mrs. Kellogg ordered her twelve-year-old stepson, “Merritt, go to Hartland Center [a village near the Kellogg farm] for Dr. Clark. Go as fast as you can. I fear your father will bleed to death.” Before embarking on the four-mile journey by horseback, Merritt—a future physician himself—suggested that his mother “bind his foot as tight as you can.”

  Merritt made a mad dash through farmland and a dense wooded forest, where only hatchet-blazed trees marked the trail, never stopping or slowing until he got to Hartland Center. The boy eventually found Clark and ordered, “Doctor, come with me quick. My father has cut his foot and is bleeding to death.” By the time Merritt and the doctor arrived, Mrs. Kellogg had managed to stop the bleeding with the makeshift tourniquet. Upon removing the bandage, everyone in the room was horrified at what they saw: a gash three and a half inches on the top side of the foot and an exit wound on the sole of the foot measuring three quarters of an inch. The ax had cut completely through John Preston’s foot.

  Dr. Clark, very likely the same one who nearly killed Mr. Kellogg with the fly blisters and calomel a few years earlier, was not exactly a skillful surgeon. Clark decided to bind a piece of soft, spongy leather to the wound. The physician asked if there was a shoemaker in the area and was quickly told there was none. Still faint from his massive blood loss, Mr. Kellogg labored to speak and eventually whispered that he owned a piece of sole leather he was saving for a new pair of shoes. Merritt knew where to find the leather and ran up the stairs to get it while the doctor manipulated the clots on the wound, causing the foot to bleed even more. Yet instead of searching for the severed blood vessels and ligating, or tying them off, he simply sewed up the entire wound, covered it with the shoe leather, followed by the application of a layer of bandages. He instructed Mrs. Kellogg to clean the wound daily with castile soap.

  No thanks to Dr. Clark, the wound took nearly two months to heal, a miracle given that the wound was closed with a germ-ridden piece of leather and without the aid of antibiotics or modern surgical or wound care. Mr. Kellogg was left with a huge, painful scar of angry red granulation tissue, what nineteenth-century doctors called “proud flesh,” and the foot swelled up and ached with the least provocation. Decades later, Dr. Merritt Kellogg concluded “had the doctor let it alone, as Mother fixed it, it would have healed in a month. By “Mother,” of course, Merritt meant Ann Janette Stanley Kellogg.

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  The Chosen One

  ANN JANETTE REARED five small children grieving the loss of their mother all the while she delivered another eleven babies to the Kellogg brood. Between 1843 and 1866, she gave birth to Mary Ann (1843–1858), Laura Evelyn (1845–1916), Emma Frances (1847, who died before her second birthday in 1849), Emma (1850–1892), John Harvey (1852–1943), Preston (1854, who died at age one year and two months in 1855), Ella (1856–1858, who also died before her second birthday), Preston Stanley (1858�
�1930), Will Keith (1860–1951), Clara Belle (1863–1951), and Hester Ann, or “Hettie” (1866–1930).1 Death was a constant specter looming over the Kellogg home and the collective mourning over these losses was often overwhelming. Inexplicable deadly epidemics, often interpreted as visitations from an angry God, struck on an almost annual basis. John Preston and the late Mary Ann’s two daughters (Julia, age thirteen, and Martha, age twelve) both died of infectious maladies in 1852, in addition to four more of Ann Janette’s children who died between 1849 and 1858.

  The death of Will’s sister Emma Frances, in 1849, was especially haunting. The local physician insisted that the child was suffering from worms while Ann Janette argued the problem was in the baby’s chest, which explained Emma’s labored breathing. After the child’s death, her mother insisted on an autopsy, an extremely rare event along the frontier, and her diagnosis of pneumonia was proven correct.2 For the rest of her life, Ann Janette believed a better doctor might have saved Emma Frances’s life. Her distrust of “regular doctors” only grew stronger with each childhood death in the family. Their feckless ways inspired Ann Janette’s interest in “water cures,” or hydrotherapy. For example, in 1850 a measles outbreak struck the whole family, which made each child terribly ill but took no lives, thanks to Ann Janette’s round-the-clock nursing and the application of cold water wraps to ease their scorching fevers. She made certain to pass on her faith in water’s healing powers to her children, especially John Harvey Kellogg.3