July
18, 2021
The philosophy of
Eugenics has led to some seriously messed up human behavior, see its
astounding effects in our articles "Someone Is Going To Be
Offended” & “What If” parts 1 & 2
Full credit for the
following article is given to its author
The Wild Story Of
John Harvey Kellogg, The Eccentric Wellness Guru Who Invented Corn
Flakes
By Leah
Silverman | Checked By Erik Hawkins Published July 13,
2021
Dr. John Harvey
Kellogg used a host of bizarre methods to prevent masturbation and
cleanse his patients’ colons at the Battle Creek Sanitarium in the
late 1800s and early 1900s.
As a leading figure
in the American hygiene movement, John Harvey Kellogg espoused a
holistic approach to health and wellness, but he also believed
genital mutilation was an appropriate anti-masturbation measure.
For a simple
American breakfast staple, “Kellogg’s Corn Flakes” has a
surprisingly sordid past, John Harvey Kellogg, who invented the
cereal with his brother, was a sort of prophet of hygiene in
20th-century America. However, although he championed nutrition and a
holistic approach to the overall health of the average American,
Kellogg was also a staunch eugenicist and launched a violent
anti-masturbation campaign that saw the genitals of young boys and
girls mutilated. So how did such a controversial scientist become the
baron of breakfast in homes across America?
John Harvey Kellogg
And Religious Medicine
John Harvey Kellogg
was born at the onset of America’s hygiene revolution on Feb. 26,
1852, in Tyrone, Michigan. This was the same year that the nation’s
first flushing toilet was patented and just eight years before the
invention of Listerine, which was originally used as an antiseptic.
At the same time, America saw a rise in temperance groups like the
Seventh-Day Adventists, whose main campaigns were
against alcohol and sex. This combination of extreme hygiene and
abstinence heavily influenced Kellogg’s theories about health and
wellness.
University of
Michigan Will Keith Kellogg never mended his relationship with his
brother John Harvey, which was irreparably damaged during their legal
battle for the rights to use their last name on their respective
cereals. Kellogg was one of 11 kids in a family of devout Seventh-Day
Adventists, and his most notorious relationship would be with his
younger brother, William Keith Kellogg, who John Harvey notoriously
sidelined as his intellectual inferior. In 1856, the Kellogg moved to
Battle Creek, Michigan, which was the mecca for Seventh-Day
Adventists at the time. Because they were so confident that Christ’s
second coming — and the end of the world — were inevitable, none
of the Kellogg children was really formally educated. John Harvey
Kellogg, however, voraciously educated himself.
When he earned his
medical degree in 1875, he had already formed a holistic model for
healthy living that hinged on the innovations of America’s hygiene
movement and his religious faith, which he dubbed “biologic living.
“All the inventions and devices ever constructed by the human hand
or conceived by the human mind, no matter how delicate, how intricate
and complicated, are simple, childish toys compared with that most
marvelously wrought mechanism, the human body.”
Kellogg deeply
revered the human body, which he referred to as “the living
temple,” and took a holistic approach to supporting it that was
based as much in nutritional science as it was in religious
extremism. He espoused vegetarianism, prohibition, and abstinence,
and he called any action outside of these things, “self-pollution.”
In sum, Kellogg was invested in total cleanliness — of the body and
the spirit — and he concocted some bizarre ways of achieving it.
In 1877,
Kellogg took over the Battle Creek Sanitarium, a health spa for
Seventh-Day Adventists, and remodeled the facility based on his
ideals for optimal living. In a nation where the average life
expectancy was 41 years and city streets were literally piled with
human feces, the Sanitarium emerged as a beacon of wellness. The
facility took off. Within a decade, it went from treating 300
patients per year to almost 1,200.
Meanwhile, Kellogg
had taken a particular interest in cleaning up America’s breakfast
routine.
A Cereal So Bland It
Hampers Sexual Desire
The average American
breakfast in the 1880s consisted mostly of meat in various forms:
cold, jellied, smoked, salted, and fried in leftover fat. Any
non-meat alternatives, like grains or oats, were time-consuming,
which made breakfast a burdensome meal in both calories and
preparation. In keeping with his desire for total cleanliness,
Kellogg encouraged his patients to eat sterile; healthy foods that he
believed all primates should eat mostly nuts and grains, and yogurt.
In addition, for years, he and his brother William worked tirelessly
to perfect a low-maintenance, grain-based breakfast cereal.
Their first attempt
was made of baked whole graham biscuits that were then crumbled into
bits. They called this “Granola,” but were ultimately unsatisfied
with the result. Finally, they settled on a flaked wheat cereal they
originally dubbed Granose. In 1902, they remanufactured the product
out of maize and called it corn flakes. However, by this time, John
Harvey grew disinterested in the enterprise, so William — the real
business brain behind the operation — bought his brother’s share
of corn flakes and opened the Battle Creek Toasted Corn Flake Company
in 1906.
He proved to be a
marketing genius and launched an uber-successful campaign telling
consumers to “wink at your grocer and see what you get,” which
resulted in a free sample of corn flakes. Meanwhile, John Harvey
continued to manufacture and sell Granose out of his own company by
the name “Kellogg’s” and sued his brother over who got the
rights to use their last name. William sued him back. After years of
fighting, during which corn flakes became all the more popular,
William won the rights to use his own name for Kellogg’s Corn
Flakes in 1920.“I am not after the business,” Kellogg said of the
affair. “I am after the reform.”
To his point, the
saga of corn flakes, more importantly, represented to John Harvey the
battle against one of life’s deadliest vices: masturbation. As a
meticulously manufactured “clean” food, Kellogg had intended for
corn flakes to rid people of their carnal desires. Terrified and
disgusted by sex nearly all his life — he never even consummated
his own relationship with his wife — Kellogg launched a violent
pseudoscientific anti-masturbation crusade. He equated fondness for
spicy foods, round shoulders, and “boldness” with signs of a
chronic masturbator. He concluded that, “such a victim
literally dies by his own hand. “Kellogg encouraged parents to tie
their children’s hands to their bedposts or to circumcise their
teenage boys. An even more aggressive tactic saw the foreskin of a
young man’s penis sewed shut to prevent erections. For young girls,
he recommended pouring carbolic acid on their clitorises. Of course,
it was Kellogg’s hope that a purer diet, provided by his Corn
Flakes, might suffice as a less gruesome method of controlling
children’s sexual desire.
John Harvey
Kellogg’s Bizarre Wellness Tips
Library of Congress
Kellogg ran the Sanitarium, pictured here, until his death in 1943.
During that time, he invented peanut butter and several nut-based
meat alternatives. In addition to creating a breakfast cereal so
bereft of flavor, he believed it would erase any desire; Kellogg’s
biggest project was his wellness retreat at the Battle Creek
Sanitarium, which he led until his death in 1943.
The facility
introduced thousands of Americans to the importance of exercise,
bathing, and occasional douching. Kellogg even invented the
mechanical horse for indoor exercise. At its height, the Sanitarium
sprawled across 30 acres and was dubbed one of the “premier
wellness destinations” in the United States. To crowds of wealthy
and unwell Americans learning about hygiene for the first time,
Kellogg basically became one of the nation’s first “wellness
gurus,” and he managed tens of thousands of patients. Among them
were retailer J.C. Penny, Henry Ford, Thomas Edison, Amelia Earhart,
and President William Howard Taft.
Nevertheless,
Kellogg also concocted some more incongruous health methods. For
instance, he encouraged his patients to get multiple enemas a day —
and invented an enema machine that could run 15 quarts of water
through the bowels in a matter of seconds. Kellogg himself received
an enema at breakfast and lunch. Kellogg also encouraged his patients
to consume a daily pint of yogurt — one-half through the mouth and
the other through the anus. Strange though that may sound, it was
actually an early way of receiving probiotics. He also patented a
chair that shook patients so violently they involuntarily defecated.
Public Domain This
pamphlet for the Sanitarium shows some of the many treatments
patients could receive there, from hydrotherapy to artificial
sunlight baths. However, for all those progressive — albeit bizarre
— beliefs about nutrition and wellness, he had equally dangerous
ones. A staunch eugenicist, Kellogg advised against “racial mixing”
and instead posited a registry that kept track of people’s medical
records so that “racial thoroughbreds” could be introduced to
each other before marriage.
He was also in favor
of the forced sterilization of criminals and organized the first Race
Betterment Conference, which was basically a fair for eugenicists.
The conference even hosted so-called Better Baby Contests, during
which white infants were judged and awarded on the basis of their
“breeding. “At the same time, however, Kellogg rejected
segregation at his Sanitarium, where he trained doctors and nurses of
color. Moreover, Kellogg treated legendary abolitionist Sojourner
Truth at the Sanitarium, once reportedly grafting some of his own
skin onto her leg to treat an ulcer.
A Tumultuous
Personal Life And Complicated Legacy
Kellogg ran the
Sanitarium until his death in 1943, before which he opened a second
health spa in Florida. He patented four medical devices, including an
artificial sunbath machine and a peanut-based meat alternative called
Nuttose.
With his wife Ella
Ervilla Eaton, he fostered 42 children, seven of whom he legally
adopted. They never had any biological children of their own. John
Harvey Kellogg also never mended his relationship with William. On
his deathbed, however, he did pen a letter of amends that was seven
pages long. “I earnestly desire to make amends for any wrong or
injustice of any sort I have done to you,” he wrote. However, his
secretary, for whatever reason, chose not to deliver the
letter. William, therefore, did not learn that his older brother had
reached out until it was too late.
Unusual though some
of his wellness treatments seemed, Kellogg must have been doing
something right: He died at the ripe old age of 91.John Harvey
Kellogg’s legacy is a complicated one. Though he brought nutrition
and hygiene to the forefront of American living as one of the
nation’s first wellness gurus, he also espoused dangerous and
violent ideas about sexuality and race. Concerned as he was with the
betterment of humanity, he primarily focused on the white race, but
he devoted his life to progress, nonetheless. Perhaps his contentious
invention of Corn Flakes, a nutritious cereal with a dangerous idea
behind it, best encapsulates his duality.
