Dr. John Harvey Kellogg AND THE RELIGION OF BIOLOGIC LIVING Dr. John Harvey Kellogg AND THE RELIGION OF BIOLOGIC LIVING Brian C. Wilson Indiana University Press Bloomington & Indianapolis This book is a publication of Manufactured in the United States of America Indiana University Press Office of Scholarly Publishing Library of Congress Herman B Wells Library 350 Cataloging-in-Publication Data 1320 East 10th Street Bloomington, Indiana 47405 USA Wilson, Brian C. Dr. John Harvey Kellogg and the religion of iupress.indiana.edu biologic living / Brian C. Wilson. pages cm Telephone 800-842-6796 Includes bibliographical references and Fax 812-855-7931 index. ISBN 978-0-253-01447-4 (hardback) — © 2014 by Brian C. Wilson ISBN 978-0-253-01455-9 (ebook) 1. Kellogg, All rights reserved John Harvey, 1852–1943. 2. Physicians— United States—Biography. 3. Hygienists— No part of this book may be reproduced or United States—Biography. 4. Battle Creek utilized in any form or by any means, electronic Sanitarium (Battle Creek, Mich.)—History. or mechanical, including photo-copying and I. Title. recording, or by any information storage and R154.K265W55 2014 retrieval system, without permission in writing 610.92—dc23 from the publisher. The Association of American [B] University Presses’ Resolution on Permissions constitutes the only exception to this prohibition. 2014008170 ∞ The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of the American National Standard for Information Sciences— Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials, ANSI Z39.48–1992. 1 2 3 4 5 19 18 17 16 15 14 For my father, Charles E. Wilson Battle Creek philosophy inculcates the idea that the laws of Nature are the laws of God, the unchangeable behests of the Master Creative Intelligence of the Universe. To become acquainted with these basic principles of existence and to render and inculcate obedience to them, this is the dominant aim and purpose of the Battle Creek Idea. —Dr. John Harvey Kellogg, “The Battle Creek Idea: What Is It?,” July 2, 1930 CONTENTS Preface xi Acknowledgments xvii Abbreviations xix 1. Battle Creek Beginnings 1 2. The Rise of the Temple of Health 30 3. The Theology of Biologic Living 62 4. The Living Temple 82 5. Dr. Kellogg’s Break with the Seventh-day Adventist Church 106 6. Dr. Kellogg and Race Betterment 133 Conclusion: The Fall of the Temple of Health 171 Notes 177 Bibliography 221 Index 233 PREFACE From 1876 to 1943, Dr. John Harvey Kellogg presided over the Battle Creek Sanitarium, an institution that, at its peak, was one of the largest and best- known health and wellness facilities in the United States, a “combination nineteenth-century European health spa and a twentieth-century Mayo Clinic.”1 Founded in 1866 under the auspices of the Seventh-day Adventist Church as the Western Health Reform Institute, the “San,” as it came to be called, grew under Dr. Kellogg’s charismatic leadership to include a massive health resort accommodating some thirteen hundred guests, a hospital, re- search facilities, a medical school, a nursing school, several health food com- panies, and a publishing house dedicated to producing materials on health and wellness. Legions of health seekers, Adventists and non-Adventists, rich and poor alike, made Battle Creek one of the premier wellness destinations in the United States, if not the world, and celebrities of all kinds, from film stars, writers, and artists to industrialists such as Henry Ford and John D. Rockefeller and even Presidents Taft and Harding, made the pilgrimage to Kellogg’s “Temple of Health” in search of the “Battle Creek Idea.” For more than two generations, Battle Creek was dominated and defined by the San, and the flamboyant personality of Dr. John Harvey Kellogg presided over all. Even after the sanitarium declined precipitously in the 1940s, Kellogg’s influence lingered, as the economy of Battle Creek came to be dominated by the expanding breakfast cereal industry, itself a spin-off from the sanitarium and the doctor’s fertile imagination.2 xi xii Preface Battle Creek Sanitarium and Hospital, ca. 1905.All images from Community Archives, Heritage Battle Creek unless otherwise noted. Today, little remains of Dr. Kellogg’s Battle Creek health empire beyond a few spectacular buildings sold long ago to the federal government. Most people who know anything about Dr. Kellogg are apt to associate him either with his most famous invention, the cornflake, or with T. C. Boyle’s 1993 comic novel, The Road to Wellville, in which he was portrayed as a megalo- maniacal quack. One of the goals of this book is to correct this caricature by contextualizing both Dr. Kellogg’s early career and the rise of the Battle Creek Sanitarium within the larger story of the Seventh-day Adventists’ abiding concern for physical health, which in turn had its roots in the antebel- lum movement for health reform, particularly that of the so-called Christian physiologists. Seen in this light, Kellogg emerges as less a quack and more an extraordinarily energetic innovator and activist, albeit one constrained by the cultural and scientific horizons of the period just after the Civil War. The Battle Creek Sanitarium should thus be seen as perhaps the grandest institutional expression of a concern for holistic health that ran deep in the American public in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries and Kellogg as one of the precursors of today’s “health gurus” such as Deepak Chopra and Andrew Weil. Admittedly, the history of the Battle Creek Sanitarium has been told else- where by both denominational and secular historians, and Dr. Kellogg has Preface xiii been well served by Richard W. Schwarz’s 1970 biography, John Harvey Kel- logg, MD.3 However, my concerns in this book ultimately focus on an aspect of Dr. Kellogg’s career that has not been fully explored in earlier works: his theological development. Inspired by Mary Farrell Bednarowski’s New Re- ligions and the Theological Imagination in America, a work that takes seriously the intellectual products of those outside the theological mainstream, I see Kellogg as an important example of an overlooked category of theological discourse: the doctor as theologian.4 Dr. Kellogg’s long professional life was balanced on the cusp of massive changes in science and medicine. Over the course of the nineteenth century, the natural sciences came to be dominated by revolutionary naturalistic theories of evolution in biology, geology, and cosmology. These theories presented trenchant challenges to long-held be- liefs about the divine origins of human beings, the earth, and the universe itself. Concomitant with the secularization of natural science, medicine also grew increasingly naturalistic in approach, such that the idea of medicine as a religious calling, which was simply assumed in the nineteenth century, was all but lost by the first decades of the twentieth.5 Indeed, by the time Kellogg died in 1943, American science and medicine had been largely secularized, and the newly dominant paradigm of scientific naturalism not only ignored religious meanings but actively suppressed them. Despite this, Kellogg re- mained resolutely a man of the nineteenth century, and while the doctor was ever mindful of trends in science and medicine, he nevertheless resisted secularism’s totalizing demands to the end of his life. Undoubtedly, Kellogg was not the only physician who faced the challenges of reconciling science with religion during this period, but in many ways his situation was unique. Kellogg’s refusal to give in to the secularizing currents of his day had a lot to do with the fact that he was born and raised in the environment of Yan- kee sectarianism, specifically that of Seventh-day Adventism, in the small Michigan town of Battle Creek. Kellogg was the son of one of the earliest Adventist families in Battle Creek, which was already noted for its sectarian diversity even before the Adventists arrived. By the time he was an adoles- cent, his energy and intelligence had brought him to the attention of James and Ellen G. White, whose protégé he became. Steeped in the Adventist subculture from an early age, Kellogg acquired the deep-seated defensive- ness characteristic of sectarians, a defensiveness that would allow him to resist the pressures of secular science and medicine later. He also acquired xiv Preface the Seventh-day Adventist propensity for the kind of amateur theologizing that was so prevalent during the early days of the denomination.6 Without a single authority to enforce theological uniformity, a wide range of theo- logical speculation was commonplace in the pages of Seventh-day Adventist newspapers, journals, and books, and from an early age John Harvey Kellogg felt that he, too, could contribute to this aspect of his tradition. Indeed, Kel- logg’s training as a physician led him to assume that his pronouncements should carry special weight. This is not to say that Kellogg remained completely true to the Adventist beliefs of his childhood—far from it. Once exposed to the erosive logic of the natural sciences during his medical training, Kellogg’s restless mind would not allow him simply to accept the dogmas of Seventh-day Adventism with- out synthesizing them with his new scientific and medical knowledge. The eventual result, Kellogg’s theology of “biologic living,” which “biologized” sin and sacralized wellness, can be seen as an attempt at a via media between the Adventism of his youth and the secular science of modern medicine, a kind of Adventist modernism that replaced a literal biblicism with a nonan- thropomorphic theology of divine immanence. As such, Kellogg’s biologic living, especially as it was expressed in his major work, The Living Temple (1903), represents one of the more interesting products of the Yankee theo- logical imagination to come out of the Midwest.