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.
The treatments were vast and ever-developing, most of which would be considered rather odd, or even absurd, by today’s standards. One of them included covering the underweight guests with sandbags; another option was rooms that featured tubes and systems to bring in fresh air and expel germs, and a cage that would relax the patient with static electricity. They were all the latest and most innovative treatments of the era.
Dr Kellogg did have a tendency to fixate rather passionately on a number of twisted pursuits however. One of the main focuses he had was his self-declared war on the human colon. He was obsessed to the extent that he actually wrote a 362-page book in 1915 titled Colon Hygiene, in which he explores the functions and possible treatments of the colon, up to and including removal. Kellogg felt passionately about the impurity and spiritual uncleanliness of the organ:
in the treatment of every chronic disease, and most acute maladies, the colon must be reckoned with. That the average colon, in civilized communities, is in a desperately depraved and dangerous condition, can no longer be doubted. The colon must either be removed or reformed.
Kellogg treated thousands of patients at The San over the years, most of them with surgery, referring to it as, ‘a hold of unclean and hateful parasites, a veritable Pandora’s box of disease and degeneracy’. He firmly believed in the unclean nature of the colon:
That most despised and neglected portion of the body, the colon, has in recent years been made the subject of much scientific study and research, with the result that a lively controversy has been stirred up over the question as to whether this organ should be permitted to remain a part of the ‘human form divine,’ or whether it should be cast out as worse than useless and unworthy of place in the anatomy…
Kellogg also firmly believed in the healing power of sunlight. A light machine that Kellogg invented was even showcased at the 1893 Chicago World’s Fair. The machine utilised light bulbs to create heat and light intended to cure various diseases. He also believed that the colour white absorbed the sun, so he consistently wore all white clothing to help him absorb the full benefits that sunlight could offer. He would often utilise an Arc lamp to the scalp or ear as another way to absorb healing light.
Dr Kellogg invented a number of quack medical contraptions, which he was convinced would help his patients at The San. These included the electrotherapy exercise bed, medical slapping-massage machine, two and four person food vibrators, mechanical horses, the infamous Oscillomanipulator and the hot air bath. In fact, The San had an entire Vibro-Mechanical department. Kellogg also found that music inspired people to exercise and eliminated some of the boredom associated with the often tedious process. He even created early workout music recordings on phonograph to help inspire his patients.