The Kelloggs Read online

  Not satisfied to merely read medical texts or set the latest Ellen White sermon into type, the teenaged John began composing his own editorials on health matters for the Seventh-day Adventist publications, thus marking the opening leaves of a prolific career as a writer. Within the crucible of these exciting influences, John explored how he might be of the most service to God and humanity. On many nights, he snuck out of the house, through his bedroom window, for long walks along the empty streets of Battle Creek. He always seemed to wind up at the Review and Herald Press building, then the tallest and largest structure in town. Letting himself in through a side door, John breezed past the enormous press room and scaled several flights of steps to reach the rooftop. Once there, he stood and gazed at the surrounding town, homes, and countryside. He imagined the heaven above him. He dreamed big dreams. Some evenings he sat near a chimney, pencil and pad in hand, composing baroque poems dedicated to the moon and stars, the divine creator, and his ambitious hopes to better mankind. Expressing his thoughts in verse was a literary hobby he indulged in for the rest of his life. Yet it was a daytime reverie that presaged the next step in his career path:

  One day while working in the broom factory, I stopped for lunch and sat down on the steps at the back of the building, with my head in my hands thinking about the future…and I had a vision. I saw a road winding up a hill, where stood a schoolhouse. There were groups of children coming along the road—ragged, unkempt, pitiful children—going towards the schoolhouse. I saw myself standing in the doorway of the schoolhouse, beckoning the children to come in. I knew at that instant that I had found my life work. It was to help children. Some of the faces of those children were so deeply impressed upon my mind that I often found myself looking for them in later years.6

  Whether it was in the classroom or, more informally, with youngsters at Sabbath School sessions, John loved teaching. It satisfied his need to control and command the attention of an audience. Moreover, it served as a productive outlet to expand and share his rapidly growing knowledge base. He mastered the available texts on pedagogy and progressive education and found novel ways to put these techniques to use. His father, John Preston, suggested he help educate his younger siblings. John began with geography and used a stick and the “soft dirt” of his father’s garden to draw maps, enchanting his brothers and sisters with stories of far-off lands. He increased the enrollment of this casual course by inviting some of the neighboring children. Soon after, he took to tutoring younger boys on everything from the rudiments of reading to mathematics.

  At sixteen, John lived and taught for a term in the district school of Hastings, Michigan (about twenty-five miles from his family home), where he supervised forty students at differing levels of learning. He reported to the schoolhouse at the break of dawn to build a fire and stoke the furnace. His workday included a full day of teaching responsibilities, often lasting until late in the evening. He could not rest until he finished grading his pupils’ tests, prepared the next day’s lesson plan, and, because he had not yet graduated from high school, study it enough to stay ahead of his students. For these efforts, he received free room and board and a monthly stipend of $30 (about $515 in 2016).

  A flare-up of tuberculosis delayed John taking the teacher’s training course at Michigan State Normal College in Ypsilanti until he was twenty. During the interregnum, he completed his high school work, did occasional stints at the Review and Herald, sold brooms for his father, and, mostly, convalesced. When John did matriculate into the Normal College, he quickly moved to the head of his class. John astounded his professors by passing the mathematics examination without even taking the course.7 Restricted to a budget of 6 cents per day (about $1.20 in 2016), he lived in Ypsilanti “like a monk,” dining only on a small daily allotment of vegetables, nuts, fruits, and Graham bread. In 1872, he graduated as a bona fide schoolteacher.

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  THAT SAME YEAR, James and Ellen White conspired to delicately steer John’s ambitions toward medicine.8 The Whites had more than mentorship in mind. They were worried about the paltry success of their Western Health Reform Institute in Battle Creek, which at this stage was little more than a boardinghouse offering water cures and teaching the Seventh-day Adventist health regimen to visiting coreligionists. The doctors in attendance were buffoons, poorly trained, and not exactly inspirational. To bolster the medical staff at the Western Institute with more qualified physicians, the Whites sent John and two of their sons, Edson and Willie, and a young Adventist acolyte named Jennie Trembley for a six-month course at Russell Trall’s Hygeio Therapeutic College in Florence, New Jersey. Trall was the editor of Ann Janette Kellogg’s favorite health periodical, The Water Cure Journal, and centered his practice on hydropathy, which involved consuming huge volumes of water and the application of hot and cold water-soaked wraps, ostensibly to rid the body of toxins and inflammation.9 The forty-year-old Dr. Merritt Kellogg was selected to serve as a chaperone. He attended Trall’s school for six months in the winter of 1867, and saw the trip as an opportunity to gain some additional medical training.10

  Ellen, Willie, James, and Edson White, circa 1860s Credit 16

  It was Merritt, incidentally, who convinced the Whites to form an alliance with Trall and his odd little school, even if the New Jersey hydropath was considered to be an outsider in the Seventh-day Adventist community. After completing his first set of coursework at the Trall Hygeio Therapeutic College in 1867, Merritt returned to Battle Creek. He assured the Whites of the compatibility between Dr. Trall’s medical theories and Ellen’s visions of health reform. Equally important to this pitch, Merritt demonstrated that his commitment to Adventism was neither diluted by his travels east nor challenged by his “secular” education, giving his endorsement of Trall even more credibility.

  In May of 1868, the Whites invited Dr. Trall to Battle Creek to lecture at the all-important annual General Conference meeting. According to one “unreliable” witness, who wrote about the events more than thirty-five years later, Ellen declined to attend Trall’s lectures. She did consent to daily carriage rides with the physician, during which she discussed her “visions” with God on “hygiene, disease and its causes, the effects of medicine, etc.” Dr. Trall assured Mrs. White “that her ideas were all in the strictest harmony with physiology and hygiene, and that on many of the subjects she went deeper than he ever had.”11

  Russell T. Trall, John Harvey Kellogg’s first medical professor Credit 17

  Not long after his Battle Creek pilgrimage, Dr. Trall became a regular contributor to The Health Reformer, an arrangement that helped both the Adventist publication, which was enriched by running an interesting and well-known medical author, and Trall, for which it was a perfect and wide-reaching forum that presented his work to many new readers. In 1872, for example, the Adventist-run Office of the Health Reformer published one of Trall’s most prescient publications, An Essay on Tobacco-Using. In it, Dr. Trall warned not only against the many physical, mental, and moral dangers of smoking tobacco but also the dangers for those exposed to the exhaled smoke, or what we today refer to as “second hand smoking”:

  A person has no more right to pollute the air which all must breathe alike with tobacco smoke, than he has to poison it with the fomites of yellow fever, or the infection of small-pox….My neighbor will no more be allowed to spit tobacco-juice in my house, or blow smoke into my face, than he will be permitted to strike me with felonious intent, or stab me with malice prepense.12

  At its height of operations, the Trall Hygeio Therapeutic College was connected to the Trall Hygeian Home, a small-scale version of what would become John’s Battle Creek Sanitarium. Invalids came to take “the water cure,” enjoy long walks on the beautiful grounds overlooking the Delaware River, ride horses, sail and rowboat, chop wood and clear brush, garden, and, on Dr. Trall’s advice, spin wool, “one of the best possible exercises for women.”13 Patients were encouraged to take control of their health by practicing personal hygiene, vegetari
an diets, and vigorous exercise, or as Trall called it, the “movement cure.” Dr. Trall lectured to his patients on all these matters, drawing from his many books, such as The Scientific Basis of Vegetarianism and The Complete Gymnasium.14

  When it came to sexuality, however, Dr. Trall did not hew to the draconian theories espoused by Ellen White or Graham and his ilk. Instead, he appreciated sexual activity as both critical for procreation and, as long as it was conducted within the confines of marriage, a pleasurable experience. In his advice tome, Sexual Physiology and Hygiene, he advised, “Surely, if sexual intercourse is worth doing at all, it is worth doing well.”15 There were limits, especially for women who spoiled themselves and their husbands by having sex too often. “I have had patients,” Trall warned, “who had for years indulged in sexual intercourse as often as once in twenty-four hours, and some who have indulged still oftener. Of course, the result was premature decay and, in many cases, permanent invalidism.” In the same book, he recommended contraceptive methods to avoid unwanted pregnancies and protect the health of women who were at risk of dying prematurely because of bearing too many children. The physician also argued passionately about “the right of a woman to her own person.” Sexual intercourse was “under all circumstances, for the female to accept or refuse, and not for the male to dictate or enforce.”16

  The Trall Hygeian Home and Hygeio Therapeutic College Credit 18

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  SEXUAL CONGRESS ASIDE, by the time John arrived to the Trall College in the fall of 1872, the place was shabby, poorly attended by patients and students, and facing extinction because of an oncoming wave of reform in American medical education. The great Dr. Trall, the same explicator of disease whom John had so often read with delight and translated into hot type, was old, tired, and no longer an inspiring teacher. Enrollment had dropped from a high of fifty students per term to fewer than twenty.17 Merritt later recalled that the curriculum consisted of a few lectures on water therapy and vegetarianism delivered by a wobbly and distracted Dr. Trall. There was also a course on physiology and hygiene delivered by a woman doctor named Harmon who “seemed to be quite thoroughly acquainted with the subject.” Miss Harmon most impressed Merritt with her clothes. She wore a “health reform dress of her own device” consisting of a cutaway men’s dress coat that, in the front, resembled a woman’s dress, and “men’s trousers” underneath.18

  The Kelloggs, the White boys, and Jennie Trembley spent their days in a stuffy, overheated classroom. They took their meals and slumbered at night in an adjoining boardinghouse run by Mrs. Trall. Merritt complained of being served “wormy” dried fruit, “which we had to examine very carefully before eating,” Graham flour mush, bread, and boiled potatoes without butter, salt, sugar, pepper, vinegar, or condiments of any kind. On special occasions, the half-brothers scrambled to a grocer in the nearby village and bought themselves a fresh apple or two; if especially lucky, they found an orange or a lemon.19

  On many winter evenings, Merritt and John escaped outdoors for some much needed recreation. They enjoyed skating on the frozen Delaware River, which lay a mere fifty feet below the bluff on which the school stood, and often glided two miles downriver where William Penn first settled and farmed after his arrival to America. Once there, they drank a replenishing dose of “pure, sweet water” from the well Mr. Penn had dug, rested a short while, and then turned around to skate back to the Trall boardinghouse. On other occasions, the young men congregated with their fellow students in the dining room to trade tales and sing songs. Things became especially raucous when they all joyously danced to the accompaniment of John’s violin. His signature tune was one of the greatest hits of early-nineteenth-century American popular music, “Turkey in the Straw.” Although John enjoyed being the center of attention while playing music to an audience, he worried about the possibility of committing, or at least encouraging, a sin. He confessed to Merritt, “I don’t know what my sister Emma would say if she knew I had played for a dance.” Merritt managed to convince his younger half-sibling that dancing with ladies was perfectly wholesome if conducted as a form of physical exercise.20

  As with so many proprietary medical schools of this era, the education offered at the Trall Institute was patently inadequate. Decades later, Merritt allowed that the proper training of doctors was not the college’s primary goal: “Dr. Trall did not conduct a medical school for his health but for the money there was in it.” Short on teachers, the hydrotherapist enlisted Merritt to lecture on human anatomy during the twenty-week period the Battle Creek contingent was in attendance. In return, Dr. Trall arranged for a weekly $10 discount on their room and board (about $200 in 2016). When the students complained there was no course in chemistry, John volunteered to apply the lessons he learned at Michigan State Normal College and instruct the others. Matters became testy, however, when John turned to the new field of organic chemistry, whereupon the old man shut the course down.21 To describe the contretemps briefly, organic chemistry sought to explain the chemical and physical actions underpinning every human and animal physiological mechanism. Dr. Trall heatedly objected to such notions, countering that a God-given (and driven) vital force controlled all of the inner workings of the body. The relationship between the aging teacher and his ambitious and overly bright student deteriorated with each passing day. A few years later, in 1875, John had his revenge when he assumed the editorship of The Health Reformer. Once in the chair, John began to criticize Trall’s diatribes against the medical profession. Eventually, he convinced James White to drop Trall’s column, depriving the hydrotherapist of a powerful pulpit.22

  Academic battles aside, John exhibited a scholarly intensity at the Trall College that would characterize the rest of his professional career. As Merritt recalled in 1916:

  During all this time, my brother was the most studious person in the institution. He and I occupied the same study room, the same sleeping room, and the same bed. At eight or nine o’clock in the evening, after having had our recreation, we would study together until ten or eleven o’clock, then I would retire. My brother would continue his study till two or three o’clock in the morning, then he would retire, and I would get up and resume my studies until time for breakfast. Between us, we kept the stove in our study room red hot all winter long, as hard coal was cheap and we had plenty of it.23

  John left New Jersey in the spring of 1873, clutching a large, calligraphied diploma bearing Dr. Trall’s greetings and awarding him the title of medical doctor. Deep down, however, he knew the certificate meant little and, if anything, made him a potential danger to those seeking his medical advice. In later years, John made it a point of pride that he never included the Trall degree on his Curriculum Vitae or his annual entries in Who’s Who. Ellen and James White’s “scholarship program” for the four young Adventists was about as successful as a stomped-on soufflé. Neither of the White boys demonstrated much aptitude for medicine despite their mother’s hopes that they would become physicians.24 Jennie Trembley returned to Battle Creek and married an Adventist doctor named D. B. Richards in July of 1874. She resumed her editorial tasks in December of 1880 but soon after “was taken suddenly and violently sick from cold, which resulted in typhoid pneumonia” and her ultimate demise.25 Only John would pursue a medical career.

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  BY THE TIME he returned to Battle Creek, John grasped that American medicine was in a state of flux and, in order to practice at the level his ambitions demanded, he required a better education. James White agreed, knowing that the Western Health Reform Institute would only succeed if staffed by doctors who understood the denomination’s health reform philosophy and mastered the evolving science of medicine. Not wanting the young man to veer too far from familiar environs, however, White suggested that John matriculate into the two-year course at the University of Michigan in nearby Ann Arbor.

  Slightly smaller than Battle Creek (population, 7,363) and eighty miles due east, Ann Arbor had only 5,838 inhabitants, not counting the more
than 1,200 college students in residence during the school year.26 Unfortunately, John was to be as discontented with the medicine taught in Ann Arbor as he was in New Jersey. During the 1870s, some of the Michigan faculty members agitated to improve the educational standards. They were summarily turned down by the dean, who worried that setting the bar too high might encourage prospective students to apply elsewhere where a medical degree could be more easily obtained.27 This concern extended to the rudimentary entrance examination, which was written to be simple enough for most grammar school graduates to pass. It consisted of questions about American geography and government and a few general questions about the candidate’s previous work experiences and the name of the medical preceptor they planned to study under after their didactic work was completed in Ann Arbor.28

  During the fall of 1873 through the spring of 1874, when John sat in the University of Michigan lecture halls, the curriculum he undertook was little different from that of most other “regular” or allopathic medical colleges in the United States: a six-to-nine-month course of lectures and demonstrations in anatomy, chemistry, physiology, pathology, and materia medica (the memorization of hundreds of prescriptions of commonly used drugs ranging from mercury and arsenic to strychnine and ipecac). During the second year of medical school, the students were required to sit through an exact repeat of these lectures, followed by a four-or-more-year apprenticeship under a practicing physician, an experience that varied heavily depending on the quality of the doctor the student selected. The senior physician John proposed to study under for this purpose was his half-brother, Merritt Kellogg.