The Kelloggs: The Battling Brothers of Battle Creek

Book Title: The Kelloggs: The Battling Brothers of Battle Creek

Book Author: Howard Markel

Publication Information: New York, Pantheon, 2017, 506 pp., $35, hardback, also available as an e-book

Howard Markel is a prominent medical historian who has written mostly about health and medical care in the United States from the late 1800s onward. Based in Battle Creek at the University of Michigan, he had ready access to several important archival collections, including the JH Kellogg collection at the Bentley Historical Library in Ann Arbor, and documents pertaining to the business of the Sanitorium at the Michigan State University library. He also had access to grandchildren and others who knew the Kellogg brothers, which deepened his understanding of these characters and their motivations.

The book examines the lives of the well-known cereal mogul WK Kellogg and his older brother, the physician John Harvey (JH) Kellogg, who was much better known for most of their lives, but who has been largely forgotten since his death. Markel places their beginnings in the Adventist sect’s spiritual revival and abstemious hygiene rules. At a time when medical treatments in the United States could best be described as barbaric (bleeding, amputation and cauterization without anesthetic, cupping, and mustard plasters for example), the Adventist laity healed infections and horrific wounds with balms, baths, and broths. The book follows JH through his piecemeal medical training and his gradual takeover of the Adventists’ Western Health Reform Institute, which he transformed from a glorified boarding house into a well-equipped health resort frequented by the rich and famous. The Sanitorium, as he rebranded it, became world famous for treating indigestion, dyspepsia, and “autointoxication” with baths, exercise, enemas, the elimination of alcohol and tobacco, in extreme cases surgery, and, above all, a high fiber vegetarian diet. Experiments with improving the palatability of the latter led to the development of many food products, including the now ubiquitous corn flakes. WK, who had served for decades as his brother’s personal assistant and de facto practice manager, eventually spun off the cereal business, leading to a decades-long legal battle over production and marketing rights.

Markel’s lively narrative style makes the book a cracking good read for those interested in the history of family medicine, and particularly in the history of complementary and alternative medicine. It is also a superb biography of two prominent Americans. He properly places the Kelloggs in the mainstream of turn-of-the-century medical practice. What perhaps is missing is an explication of how and why the paradigm shifted away from such practices as pharmaceutical researchers finally developed effective drugs (eg, penicillin, insulin, and thiazide diuretics).

Markel also rightly places the Kelloggs within the context of the Progressive movement in American society, and neatly describes their wishful thinking that a combination of better technology and better behavior would end disease and poverty. So much of their worldview remains in the assumptions that underlie our daily work. For example, that dietary recommendations matter, or that anyone follows them, or that some foods are healthier than others.

I would have liked Professor Markel to expand on the low state of scientific inquiry in the period. Clinical studies of the time were largely limited to case series and other forms of uncontrolled observation that would, in the current context, have difficulty rising to level of evidence 2b. Large randomized controlled studies with human subjects did not become standard until the 1960s. Because of the cost, they remain rare beyond the realm of big pharmaceutical companies. Markel misses the opportunity to put forward an argument for much more generous funding of research in what has come to be called complementary and alternative medicine. But that is a large subject that would require a separate book. Hopefully he will take on that project next.

I highly recommend this book. The serious student of the history of medicine will find the desired detail and context, and the general reader will find the narrative entertaining and easy to follow. As we once again debate who gets what health care and how it is paid for, physicians who take the broader view of medicine and its place in society will want to read this book. Understanding how we got to where we are will perhaps help us make wiser recommendations about where to go from here.