The Kelloggs Page 8
The University of Michigan Medical School, circa 1866. Students who registered last had to contend with the worst seats in the lecture amphitheater, way high up and in the back. Credit 19
In class, John was disgruntled and bored largely because of the protocol of seating assignments. The Michigan Medical School calendar clearly stated, “seats in the lecture rooms are assigned by selection to students in the order of registration on the Steward’s books, and each student is expected to occupy during the session such seat as he may select. The graduating class, by courtesy, are allowed the privilege of the seats nearest the operating table and lecture desk.”29 John came very late to the party by registering for classes on October 16. As a result, he was exiled to seat number 336, way high up in the auditorium, far away from the patients and out of earshot of the lecturer’s voice.30
When it came to interesting patients, there was not much to see in Ann Arbor. Victor C. Vaughan, a classmate and, later, the longtime dean of the University of Michigan Medical School, complained that in the 1870s the “University Hospital” was “nothing more than a receiving home, in which patients brought in for the clinics could be kept before and after presentation to the class. There were no wards and no operating or dressing rooms, no place where students might receive bedside instruction.”31 The lack of a big, busy university hospital was frustrating to the professors and students alike. The university’s long distance from the more populous Detroit translated into a dearth of patients to treat and use for teaching purposes. Ann Arbor medicine was a perfect example of the axiomatic quandary Dr. William Osler presented to his students at the Johns Hopkins Medical School: “To study the phenomenon of disease without books is to sail an uncharted sea, while to study books without patients is not to go to sea at all.”32
The lectures young John enjoyed best were delivered by Alonzo Palmer, a brilliant professor of pathology, materia medica, and the practice of medicine, a former Civil War surgeon, and a founder of the Michigan State Medical Society. Professor Palmer was a devout Episcopalian and, like John’s Adventist mentors, an avowed enemy of all things alcoholic, nicotinic, or caffeinated. Equally important, Palmer looked askance at the many toxic drugs doctors then prescribed and, instead, suggested far gentler therapies including regular bathing, personal hygiene, exercise, and adequate amounts of sleep and rest. Palmer recommended the consumption of lots of vegetables and Graham flour–based breads to relieve constipation, much to the ridicule of his more aggressive colleagues at Michigan, many of whom prescribed powerful laxatives and insisted that children fed a purely vegetarian diet were bound to get ill since “man could not live on vegetables alone.”33
Despite his childhood aversion to blood, John also took a shining to a dashing young Canadian surgeon named Donald Maclean. Dr. Maclean trained in Edinburgh under the surgical reformer James Syme and was an early adherent to Joseph Lister’s methods of antiseptic surgery. According to Victor Vaughan, Dr. Maclean “was the beau ideal of the young men on the benches [the medical students].”34 During the course of his seventeen-year tenure at Michigan, Maclean came to be resented and shunned by many of his faculty colleagues. He was derided as a troublemaker who too frequently urged the students to leave bucolic Ann Arbor and seek training in a major urban center such as Detroit or Chicago, where he believed they could more reliably find the wealth of clinical experience they sorely needed.35
Dr. Maclean was not the only teacher in Ann Arbor who stressed the importance of seeking professional training in a large city. Two of his other professors had strong connections to New York City. Most American physicians considered New York to be the nation’s medical Parnassus because of the size of its population, the number of hospitals and physicians practicing there, and a dedicated culture of medical progress. One of John’s teachers, the anatomist Corydon L. Ford, spent the fall and winter terms in Ann Arbor but every spring and summer he taught anatomy and physiology at Long Island College Hospital. John’s obstetrics and gynecology professor, Edward Swift Dunster, had a similar arrangement between Michigan and Long Island and, eventually, moved on to teach at Bellevue Hospital Medical College.
There exists no documentary evidence of exactly why John Harvey Kellogg abandoned the two-year course at the University of Michigan halfway through, but it seems likely that being forced to watch the classroom exercises from a distance, the insufficient patient census, and the urging of one or more of his professors all contributed to his decision to attend a large urban medical school connected to a big, busy hospital.36
John completed the winter 1874 term at Michigan and in spring returned to Battle Creek for an advanced course in shorthand. He applied these skills at the side of Elder White during the annual Seventh-day Adventist conference.37 In between the sessions, John informed James and Ellen White about the poor quality of his medical education. The Whites listened and were prepared to invest more resources in John, who had already proved his natural aptitude to be far beyond that of his half-brother Merritt or the White boys. James White asked the young man where he might go if he had the money.
Realizing a long sojourn to the vaunted medical schools of Vienna, Berlin, or Paris was not a viable option, John repeated the advice he likely received from his Michigan professors: the best place to study medicine in America was New York City’s Bellevue Hospital Medical College. The Whites prayed on this question and returned to John with a united front of opposition against his “going out into the world.” They worried about John’s getting caught in the sticky web of sin and urban temptation that was New York City. They spent hours trying to convince him to pick another school. John held his ground and pledged that his head would not be turned by such wicked doings. According to the doctor’s secretary, August Bloese, “the last thing John heard when he boarded the train was the old gentleman [James White] exhorting him to give up this dangerous project and to remain safe at home within the field.”38 Bloese’s version rings less than true; shortly after the 4th of July holiday, the Whites agreed to lend John the monumental sum of $1,000 (or $21,400 in 2016) so that he could matriculate into Bellevue that fall. At the end of August, the twenty-two-year-old John Harvey Kellogg boarded a powerful locomotive train bound for the biggest and, to many God-fearing folks, most iniquitous city in the Union. He was about to begin the medical adventure that launched his career.
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“WILLIE,” as the Kelloggs’ youngest son was then known, experienced a far less meteoric childhood and adolescence. Eight years younger than “everybody’s favorite,” John, Will was not considered to be bright, vivacious, sociable, or much fun. The boy was truly unhappy. He despised his nickname Willie and never cared for the more formal William Keith. Will found his name to be so grating that at the age of thirty-eight he legally changed it to Will Keith.
One of the few things that did tickle him as a little boy was thinking about and calculating numbers and figures. Born his father’s seventh son, on the seventh day of the week (Saturday) and the seventh day of the month (April 7, 1860) and with a surname containing seven letters, Will had a lifelong affinity for the number seven. As an adult, he reserved hotel rooms only on the seventh floor and he made sure his automobiles’ license plates always ended with the number seven. The great “good luck and fortune” he was to derive from his birth order and the resultant numerology would not be evident for several decades to come but it was a superstition he held dear. As he told his grandson John Leonard Kellogg Jr., “If one seven is good, seven sevens ought to be better. Who can fail to make a success in anything with a combination of seven times seven in the family?”39
“Lucky sevens” aside, almost every other childhood memory Will articulated as an adult, which if collected in seriatim might fill two or three typewritten pages at best, is enveloped in a cloud of melancholy. Will never felt smart enough, loved enough, or even worthy enough to deserve much of a future. Diffident but desperate for attention, he was too socially awkward to know how to ask for it, let alone find it. As
a result, young Will felt deprived of positive attention from either of his parents. Years later, when dedicating his fortune to making the “lives of little children happier, healthier and more promising for their adult years,” Will poignantly reflected that as a boy “I never learned to play.”40
Will did become the center of his parents’ attention when he developed the fevers, chills, and aches of malaria. Will’s was hardly a rare case. Malaria was a major health threat to Americans living in the Deep South all the way up to Michigan, Illinois, and Minnesota because of the enormous population of female Anopheles mosquitoes, too many swampy, stagnant pools of water, and the ubiquity of two of the most common causative parasitic malarial organisms, Plasmodium falciparum and Plasmodium vivax. Between 1861 and 1866, for example, more than one million Union soldiers were diagnosed with malaria.41
Decades later, Will recalled the stress of imbibing copious amounts of water, enduring his mother’s applications of ice-cold compresses to alleviate the burning fevers, and hot water wraps for the chills, followed by daily prayer sessions and huge doses of quinine:
The entire state of Michigan was known for its malaria. I had several spells of this miserable disease. I would have a chill, then a high fever, and the next day I would skip the chill and fever and would occasionally feel fairly well. The use of quinine was known at that time in the form of a black substance that looked very much like stick licorice. Pellets were made from this product and the horrible bitter-tasting stuff was administered to me in applesauce. Capsules had not been devised. They did not administer this medicine until after several months of chills and fever. I lost much weight and also my ruddy complexion. My skin was a yellow, bilious color. My tongue was coated continuously and I had no appetite.42
Although Will eventually recovered, John insured that his daily childhood life was a living hell. The elder son used his guile and storytelling skills to tattle on Will’s every indiscretion, knowing that his stern father would transform them into mountainous sins and mete out a swift punishment.43 Worse, John surreptitiously administered a daily barrage of verbal humiliation accompanied by painful punches, shoves, and a hundred other abuses. Hardly surprising, Will much preferred the company of his sisters or the docile and sweet Preston Stanley, his other older brother by two years, to any and all contact with John. This inclination only increased as the decades passed. Always careful not to criticize the doctor publicly, the adult Will politely described their childhood relationship with a telling anecdote about their sharing of a bed as boys: “I have vivid recollections of John warming his cold feet by placing same on my back, not conducive to sleeping well.”44
Will’s father always seemed disappointed with the stroppy boy. John Preston Kellogg repeatedly told his wife that teaching Will to read was a waste of time. This conclusion was based on more than just the patriarch’s belief that the end of the world was at hand. Especially damaging to the boy’s fragile psyche was the father’s insistence that Will was intellectually lacking and destined to become a burden to the family unless he learned some vocational skills. Fortunately, Ann refused to accept her husband’s edict and insisted that Will enter the Battle Creek No. 3 Ward School, at eight, and two years later an Adventist, sectarian “select” school. Will’s recollections of his brief schooling consisted of a smattering of elementary mathematics and a steady diet of lessons on reading, morality, and character as spelled out in the poems, short stories, and pictures of the McGuffey Eclectic Readers, which enjoyed a huge popularity, influence, and use in schoolhouses across America between 1830 and 1900.45
Will’s teachers reinforced John Preston’s harsh assessment, especially when compared to his stellar older brother. In the classroom, Will was dutiful but “dull” and his formal education ended at the age of thirteen. A major cause of his so-called dullness, incidentally, was not discovered until years later: he was terribly nearsighted. Will discussed this sorry situation many times during his working life:
When I was a boy in school, the teacher thought I was dim-witted because I had difficulty reading what was on the blackboard. I was twenty years old before I myself found out what was the matter: I was nearsighted. A proper medical examination would have settled that the day I entered school. Since then, I have often thought of what science can do for underprivileged children if they can be taken in hand at the proper time.46
Like many men who succeeded despite poor educational attainment, as an adult Will overcompensated by becoming a voracious reader of books on history and the occasional novel. Although he was famous for eschewing casual conversation, when he did speak, he was articulate, interesting, and “had a nice command of the English language,” which allowed him to coin phrases, make astute observations, and utter the occasional witticism.47 One friend later compared Will to President Calvin Coolidge, “who had two languages, the language of statesmanship and the language of the country store on a Saturday afternoon.”48
Whether real or perceptual, the experience of being the slowest kid in the classroom had a corrosive effect on Will’s development. From childhood and throughout his adulthood, he wore an expressionless face that rarely revealed his thinking or feelings, a trait that later baffled his business associates who complained behind his back that he was cold. His school chum Frank Belden later recalled that unlike the other boys in school, Will never suffered a beating from their sadistic schoolmaster: “Will K. was into meanness just as much as the others but he had such a poker face that the teacher never blamed him for some of the pranks.”49 Yet in a very real sense Will’s lifelong guarded nature may have been a manifestation of his insecurity. He desperately wanted to be loved but was, as his biographer Horace Powell observed, “reluctant to form close relationships because of the fear of losing them. He moved cautiously among his fellow men, anticipating rebuffs and ready for the fight or the flight.”50
Beyond his horribly blurred vision and the resultant inability to read the facial expressions of his peers, Will’s tight-lipped expression might also be explained by his precarious dental health. In an era before fluoride treatments and modern dentistry, Will developed multiple cavities and, before he was twenty, lost most of his teeth. His smile was marred by a not so charming, toothless grin. In later life, Will occasionally entertained his youngest grandchildren by “slipping [his dentures] from their moorings with his tongue.” Once he had the means to give away his vast fortune, however, the bespectacled and dentured Will insisted that children’s dental and eye care be among the major foci of his beneficent W. K. Kellogg Foundation.51
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AT AGE SIX, Will began working in his father’s broom factory, first after school and later full-time. As his brothers before him, Will sorted straw and broomcorn for the manufacture of sweeping sticks six days a week, excluding the Saturday Sabbath. During the mid to late nineteenth century, the enforced labor of children was hardly restricted to the clothing factories, textile mills, and hundreds of other manufacturing firms along the Eastern Seaboard. In big cities and small towns across the United States, adults who ran large companies, parents responsible for farm harvests, and small business owners routinely enlisted the help of children, much to the detriment of these youngsters’ physical and mental development. Will, like each of his older brothers, was one of millions of American children forced into the workplace, exposed to potential injuries, and cheated out of a complete education and childhood for the pennies he earned to help support his family.52
Will’s boring and repetitive work at his father’s factory was punctuated by only one joyful event, which occurred when he was eight. After an uncharacteristic campaign by Will consisting of much begging and pleading, John Preston grudgingly allowed the love-starved boy to accompany him on a forty-mile train ride to sell brooms in Allegan, Michigan. Some eighty years later, Will precisely recollected the sights he saw, the people he met, and the one-on-one conversations he had with his father. It was an occasion of parental monopoly that was monumentally special to a boy living
with so many sisters and brothers who seemed to outshine him on a daily basis, his perception of parental neglect, and an Adventist faith that held the end of all time was soon approaching.
Clear to anyone observing this youngster, however, was a steady work ethic and growing competence for business affairs. In terms of broom making, Will quickly became even more adept than John at sorting out broomcorn, separating the seed from the brush, selecting the proper strands and wiring them together to make the sweeping portion of the broom. He also developed great skill in quickly sharpening the handles and driving them into the broom, nailing them down, and trimming off the edges to make a finished and attractive product. During a typical twelve-hour shift, Will took 5 cents (or about $1 in 2016) worth of materials plus a dime’s worth of his hourly wage (about $2 in 2016) to produce enough brooms to clear 25 cents (roughly $5 in 2016) in profit.
Before he was twelve, Will mastered the art of supervising the work of “six or eight” other boys (including his older brother Preston). At fourteen, he went on the road to sell brooms. By the age of sixteen, Will supported himself with a weekly paycheck of $18 (about $411 in 2016) and acquired significant experience in production, sales, and management even if his hard work was rarely acknowledged by his father. Decades later, Will complained, “My father was not active in the business, due to a broken hip, and while the business was conducted in the name of J. P. Kellogg and Son (Dr. J.H. being the son), I do not recall father being in the factory to any extent after his surgery.”53