John Harvey Kellogg Inventions Information

John Harvey Kellogg (February 26, 1852 – December 14, 1943) was an American medical doctor, nutritionist, inventor, health activist, and businessman. He was the director of the Battle Creek Sanitarium in Battle Creek, Michigan. The sanitarium was founded by members of the Seventh-day Adventist Church. It combined aspects of a European spa, a hydrotherapy institution, a hospital and a high-class hotel. Kellogg treated both the rich and famous and the poor who could not afford other hospitals.

Disagreements with other members of the church led to a major schism within the denomination: Kellogg was disfellowshipped in 1907, but continued to follow many Adventist beliefs and directed the sanitarium until his death in 1943. Kellogg also helped to establish the American Medical Missionary College in 1895. The College operated independently until 1910, when it merged with Illinois State University.

Kellogg was a major leader in progressive health reform, particularly in the second phase of the clean living movement. He wrote extensively on science and health. His approach to "biologic living" combined scientific knowledge with Adventist beliefs, promoting health reform, temperance and sexual abstinence. His promotion of developing anaphrodisic foods was based on these beliefs.

Many of the vegetarian foods that Kellogg developed and offered his patients were publicly marketed: Kellogg is best known today for the invention of the breakfast cereal corn flakes, originally intended to be an anaphrodisiac, with his brother, Will Keith Kellogg. His creation of the modern breakfast cereal changed "the American breakfast landscape forever."

Kellogg was an early proponent of the new germ theory of disease, and well ahead of his time in relating intestinal flora and the presence of bacteria in the intestines to health and disease. The sanitarium approached treatment in a holistic manner, actively promoting vegetarianism, nutrition, the use of enemas to clear intestinal flora, exercise, sun-bathing, hydrotherapy, and abstention from smoking tobacco, drinking alcoholic beverages and sexual activity.

John Harvey Kellogg was born in Tyrone, Michigan on February 26, 1852, to John Preston Kellogg (1806–1881) and his second wife Ann Janette Stanley (1824–1893). His father, John Preston Kellogg, was born in Hadley, Massachusetts; his ancestry can be traced back to the founding of Hadley, Massachusetts, where a great-grandfather operated a ferry. John Preston Kellogg and his family moved to Michigan in 1834, and after his first wife's death and his remarriage in 1842, to a farm in Tyrone Township.:9:14–18In addition to six children from his first marriage, John Preston Kellogg had 11 children with his second wife Ann, including John Harvey and his younger brother, Will Keith Kellogg.

John Preston Kellogg became a member of several revivalist movements, including the Baptists, the Congregationalist Church, and finally the Seventh-day Adventist Church.:9 He was one of four adherents who pledged substantial sums to convince Seventh-day Adventists Ellen G. White and her husband James Springer White to relocate to Battle Creek, Michigan, with their publishing business, in 1855.:10 In 1856, the Kellogg family moved to Battle Creek to be near other members of the denomination. There John Preston Kellogg established a broom factory.:9

The Kelloggs believed that the Second Coming of Christ was imminent, and that formal education of their children was therefore unnecessary. Originally a sickly child, John Harvey Kellogg attended Battle Creek public schools only briefly, from ages 9–11. He left school to work sorting brooms in his father's broom factory. Nonetheless, he read voraciously and acquired a broad but largely self-taught education. At age 12, John Harvey Kellogg was offered work by the Whites. He became one of their protegées,:111–112 rising from errand boy to printer's devil, and eventually doing proofreading and editorial work. He helped to set articles for Health, or how to live and The Health Reformer, becoming familiar with Ellen G. White's theories of health, and beginning to follow recommendations such as a vegetarian diet.:28 Ellen White described her husband's relationship with John Harvey Kellogg as closer than that with his own children.:111–112

Kellogg hoped to become a teacher, and at age 16 taught a district school in Hastings, Michigan.:29–30 By age 20, he had enrolled in a teacher's training course offered by Michigan State Normal School (since 1959, Eastern Michigan University) in Ypsilanti, Michigan. The Kelloggs and the Whites, however, convinced him to join his half-brother Merritt, Edson White, William C. White, and Jennie Trembley, as students in a six-month medical course at Russell Trall's Hygieo-Therapeutic College in Florence Township, New Jersey. Their goal was to develop a group of trained doctors for the Adventist-inspired Western Health Reform Institute in Battle Creek.:30 Under the Whites' patronage, John Harvey Kellogg went on to attend medical school at the University Medical School in Ann Arbor, Michigan and the New York University Medical College at Bellevue Hospital in New York City. He graduated in 1875 with a medical degree. In October 1876, Kellogg became director of the Western Health Reform Institute. In 1877, he renamed it the Battle Creek Medical Surgical Sanitarium, cleverly coining the term "sanitarium" to suggest both hospital care and the importance of sanitation and personal health.Kellogg would lead the institution until his death in 1943.

John Harvey Kellogg married Ella Ervilla Eaton (1853–1920) of Alfred Center, New York, on February 22, 1879. Kellogg followed Adventist views in favor of celibacy. The couple maintained separate bedrooms and did not have any biological children. However, they were foster parents to 42 children, legally adopting at least seven of them, before Ella died in 1920. The adopted children included Agnes Grace, Elizabeth, John William, Ivaline Maud, Paul Alfred, Robert Mofatt, and Newell Carey.

In 1937, Kellogg received an honorary degree in Doctor of Public Service from Oglethorpe University.

Pulitzer Prize-winning historian Will Durant, who had been a vegetarian since the age of 18, called Dr. Kellogg "his old mentor", and said that Dr. Kellogg, more than any other person since his high school days, had influenced his life.

Kellogg died on December 14, 1943, in Battle Creek, Michigan. He was buried in Oak Hill Cemetery in Battle Creek, Michigan. Among others buried there are his parents, his brother W.K. Kellogg, his brother's wife, James White, Ellen G. White, C. W. Post, Uriah Smith, and Sojourner Truth.

Kellogg was brought up in the Seventh-day Adventist Church from childhood, at a time when members commonly engaged in theological speculation. Selected as a protegé of the Whites and trained as a doctor, Kellogg held a prominent role as a speaker at church meetings.:xiii-xv

Throughout his lifetime, Kellogg experienced pressure from both science and religion regarding his theological views.:xiii-xvAt the Seventeenth Annual Session of the General Conference of Seventh-day Adventists, October 4, 1878, the following action was taken:

Kellogg defended "the harmony of science and the Bible" throughout his career, but he was active at a transitional time, when both science and medicine were becoming increasingly secularized. White and others in the Adventist ministry worried that Kellogg's students and staff were in danger of losing their religious beliefs, while Kellogg felt that many ministers failed to recognize his expertise and the importance of his medical work. There were ongoing tensions between his authority as a doctor, and their authority as ministers. Nonetheless, Kellogg attempted to reconcile science and medicine with religion, rejecting their separation, and emphasizing the presence of God within God's creation of living things.:xiii-xv

He further elaborated these ideas in his book The Living Temple (1903):

At the same time that Kellogg defended the presence of God in nature against secularization, his co-religionists saw his descriptions of the presence of God in nature as evidence ofpantheistic tendencies (God is in everything). Kellogg rejected their religious criticisms, asserting that his views on indwelling divinity were simply a restatement of the omnipresence of God, and not pantheism.:xiii-xv:189

What came to be referred to as the "Pantheism Crisis" of 1903 was a pivotal moment in the church's history. Kellogg's theological views were only one of the issues involved: operation of the sanitarium was equally if not more important.:xiii-xv Control of the sanitarium and its finances had been a source of contention for some time, especially as the institution expanded and attracted more affluent patients. Tensions came to a head when the Battle Creek Sanitarium, originally owned by the Seventh-day Adventist Church but run by Kellogg, was destroyed by fire on February 18, 1902. Although almost all of the guests escaped safely, property loss was estimated at $300,000 to $400,000, about twice the insured value.

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