The Kelloggs
Subtitle: the battling brothers of Battle Creek
By: Howard Markel
Edition: First edition.
Published: 2017
Language: eng
Number of pages: 506
ISBN-13: 9780307907271
Subjects: Physicians; Battle Creek Sanitarium (Battle Creek, Mich.); Industrialists; Kellogg Toasted Corn Flake Company; Kellogg Company; Biography; History
Description: "From the much admired medical historian ... and author ..., the story of America's empire builders: John and Will Kellogg. John Harvey Kellogg was one of America's most beloved physicians; a best-selling author, lecturer, and health-magazine publisher; founder of the Battle Creek Sanitarium; and patron saint of the pursuit of wellness. His youngest brother, Will, was the founder of the Battle Creek Toasted Corn Flake Company, which revolutionized the mass production of food and what we eat for breakfast. In The Kelloggs, Howard Markel tells the sweeping saga of these two extraordinary men, whose lifelong competition and enmity toward one another changed America's notion of health and wellness from the mid-nineteenth to the mid-twentieth centuries, and who helped change the course of American medicine, nutrition, wellness, and diet. The Kelloggs were of Puritan stock, a family that came to the shores of New England in the mid-seventeenth century, went west to the wooded Michigan frontier to start a farm that became one of the biggest in the county, and then renounced it all for the religious calling of Ellen Harmon White, a self-proclaimed prophetess, and James White, whose new Seventh-day Adventist theology was based on Christian principles and sound body, mind, and hygiene rules--Ellen called it "health reform." The Whites groomed the young John Kellogg for a central role in the Seventh-day Adventist Church and sent him to America's finest medical school, Bellevue Hospital Medical College. Kellogg's main medical focus--and America's number one malady: indigestion (Walt Whitman described it as "the great American evil"). Markel gives us the life and times of the Kellogg brothers of Battle Creek: Dr. John Harvey Kellogg and his world-famous Battle Creek Sanitarium medical center, spa, and grand hotel attracted thousands actively pursuing health and well-being. Among the guests: Mary Todd Lincoln, Amelia Earhart, Booker T. Washington, Johnny Weissmuller, Dale Carnegie, Sojourner Truth, Henry Ford, John D. Rockefeller, Jr., and George Bernard Shaw. And the presidents he advised: Taft, Harding, Hoover, and Roosevelt, with first lady Eleanor. The brothers Kellogg experimented on malt, wheat, and corn meal, and, tinkering with special ovens and toasting devices, came up with a ready-to-eat, easily digested cereal they called Corn Flakes. As Markel chronicles the Kelloggs' fascinating, Magnificent Ambersons-like ascent into the pantheon of American industrialists, we see the vast changes in American social mores that took shape in diet, health, medicine, philanthropy, and food manufacturing during seven decades--changing the lives of millions and helping to shape our industrial age."--Jacket.
Notes: Includes bibliographical references (pages 394-480) and index.
Table of contents: title: Introduction: The Cain and Abel of America's heartland; title: Part I: "Michigan fever". "Go west, young man" ; The chosen one ; New brooms sweep clean ; Long-distance learning; title: Part II: An empire of wellness. Building the San ; "What's more American than corn flakes?" ; "Fire!" ... and cease-fire ; The new San; title: Part III: Manufacturing health. The San's operations ; A "university of health" ; Will's place; title: Part IV: Battles of old age. The prison of resentment ; The doctor's crusade against race degeneracy ; A full plate ; "Uneasy lies the head that wears a crown" ; The final score.