Kellogg
Achievements: Corn flakes
Born: February 26, 1852; Tyrone, Michigan
Died: December 14, 1943; Battle Creek, Michigan (Aged 91)
Field & Discipline: Medicine; Nutrition; Surgeon; Diatician.
Education: Michigan State Normal College Ypsilanti, 1872; University of Michigan Medical School, 1873; Bellevue Hospital Medical College, New York City, 1873-75
Major Work: “Home Hand-book of Domestic Hygiene and Rational Medicine” (1900)
Life & Times:
In 1863, when Kellogg was 11, the religious colony at Battle Creek evolved into the Seventh-Day Adventist church, and the following year Kellogg was invited by the church to learn the printing trade. Mrs Ellen [worked for] White*, the prophet and co-founder of the movement, had for the previous year begun to write extensively on health and hygiene, and Kellogg set the print type. In 1872 he enrolled in a teacher-training programme at Michigan State Normal College in Ypsilanti.
At Battle Creek the Adventists had six years earlier established the first Health Reform Institute, which offered hydropathy and other "natural" cures to patients, and the Whites were becoming increasingly aware of their need for professionally trained physicians to give their “Health Reform Institute” more respectability. They offered Kellogg, along with some other promising young Adventists, the chance to study medicine at Russell Trall's reform Hygieo-Therapeutic College in Florence Heights, New Jersey, late in 1872.
With funding from the White’s he first spent a term at the University of Michigan Medical School before transferring in 1873 to Bellevue Hospital Medical College in New York City, where he studied for the next two years. During his years at college he remained in close contact with Battle Creek. In 1874 he was made editor of the Adventist monthly, “Health Reformer” (a position he held until his death), the title of which he changed five years later to 'Good Health', and the same year published a "hygienic cookbook", his first contribution to the reform of American dietary habits. In 1874 he also published: “The Proper Diet for Man,” which advocated vegetarianism as well as temperance, abstinence from tobacco, tea, coffee, and condiments, and sparing use of eggs, dairy products, and refined sugars.
In 1876 the Whites persuaded Kellogg to become superintendent of the Battle Creek Seventh-day Adventist Western Health Reform Institute, where he followed the water-treatment techniques of [used techniques of] Priessnitz*. In 1877 he renamed it the Sanitarium. During the 1870s Kellogg became convinced that the stomach-bowel was the seat of "90 per cent of all illnesses", and began to develop his own special treatments for bowel complaints, which included hydropathy (including full-scale water and yoghurt enemas), electropathy, mechanotherapy and radium cures.
With very severe cases Kellogg tended to recommend surgical removal of a section of the intestine and, as abdominal surgery then proved fatal to a large number of his patients, he eventually decided to qualify as a surgeon. In 1883 he spent five months studying surgical procedures in London and Vienna, and returned to Europe for a second visit in 1889. By the time of his death he had performed 22,000 surgical operations.
During the 1880s Kellogg set up an experimental food laboratory at the sanitarium and began to experiment with cereal grains, his main health food, which he believed became more digestible after prolonged baking. He developed a slow-baked multigrain biscuit, coarsely ground and named "Granola". He then began experimenting with his younger brother, William.
In the early 1890s the brothers together developed a method of producing crunchy, flavourful flakes of processed grain - by feeding cooked wheat through a pair of rollers and scraping the flakes from the rollers with a bread knife - that proved a popular breakfast food among the patients at the Sanitarium. Kellogg patented this process in 1894 (which lasted until 1903), and the two men subsequently adapted the flaking process to corn and rice.
Kellogg went on develop imitiation meats made from nuts and wheat gluten, coffee substitutes, peanut butter, and artifical milk from soya beans (1930s). His ideas were soon copied by several entrepreneurs, despite the infringement of copyright, the most successful being Charles W. Post, who patented his "Grape Nuts" after Granola, and his "Postum" after Kellogg's cereal-based coffee substitute.
In 1905, William persuaded John Kellogg to sell him the rights to the manufacture of corn flakes, and established the Kellogg Toasted Corn Flakes Company.
Meanwhile, in 1895, with Adventist support, Kellogg founded the American Medical Missionary College in Chicago to train doctors in rational medical techniques and his "biologic living.” Kellogg enjoyed Adventist support for his ventures for twenty years (1876-96), and helped set up a number of Adventist sanitariums in various parts of the United States and abroad, but during the late 1890s their relationship deteriorated, mainly due to Kellogg's continual concern with medical rather than religious issues.
In 1902 the Battle Creek Sanitarium was destroyed by fire, and a combination of theological and financial disagreements led to Kellogg's expulsion from the church in 1907. Kellogg retained control of “Good Health” and the Battle Creek Sanitarium, which he rebuilt and by the 1920s had expanded to accommodate 1,200 patients. He also developed schools of nursing, hygiene, physical education, and home economics, and in 1923 he combined the various sanitarium schools with a liberal arts program to form Battle Creek College.
Kellogg twice served on the Michigan State Board of Health (1878-91 and 1911-17), and in 1914 was elected as a member of the American College of Surgeons. The same year, having become a supporter of eugenics, he established the Race Betterment Foundation with the profits from his cereals, and he promoted biologic living through numerous speaking programmes and almost 50 books, perhaps the most successful being his “Rational Hydrotherapy'”(1901).
Extra Connections: Corn husks were also key to the work of [work related to] Dobereiner*
He had many notable patients, such as former president William Howard Taft, composer and pianist Percy Grainger, arctic explorers Vilhjalmur Stefansson and Roald Amundsen, world travellers Richard Halliburton and Lowell Thomas, aviator Amelia Earhart, economist Irving Fisher, Nobel prize winning playwright George Bernard Shaw, actor and athlete Johnny Weissmuller, founder of the Ford Motor Company Henry Ford, inventor Thomas Edison,[59] African-American activist Sojourner Truth, and actress Sarah Bernhardt.[60][61][62]
Assessment: He changed the world’s breakfast.
Oneliner: J.H. Kellogg, inventor of cornflakes.
Bibliography:
- Encyclopedia Britannica.
- American National Biography.
- Schwarz, Richard W.,John Harvey Kellogg, M.D., Michigan, 1970.
- The Road to Wellville by T. Coraghessan Boyle.is a historical fictionalization of John Harvey Kellogg, the inventor of corn flakes.
Language: English
Father:: John Preston Kellogg
Mother: Anne Stanley
Siblings: Will Keith (1860-1951)
Spouse: Ella Ervilla Eaton (married 1879)
Children: No natural, but several adopted children
Multimedia:
Connections³ (1997) 1. Feedback