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Hey, Robert here. It's been like two months since I had LASIK and I'm still seeing 2020. All I had to do was go in for a consultation, then go in for a maybe 10 minute procedure and then my eyes have been great ever since. You know, I healed up wonderfully. It was very simple, couldn't have been a better experience. So if you want to explore LASIK plus I can't recommend it enough. They have over 20 years experience in the industry and they performed more than two million treatments right now if you want to try getting LASIK plus you can get $1000 off of your surgery when you're treated in September, that's $500. Of per eye, just visitmylasikoffer.com to schedule your free consultation. Hello, I'm Erica Kelly from the podcast Southern Fried true crime. And if you want to go from podcast fan to podcast host, do what I did and check out spreaker from iheart. I was working in accounting and hating it. Then after just 18 months of podcasting with Spreaker, I was able to quit my day job. Follow your podcasting dreams. Let's breaker handle the hosting, creation, distribution, and monetization of your podcast. Go to spreaker.com. That's spreaker.com. In the 1980s and 90s, a psychopath terrorized the country of Belgium. A serial killer and kidnapper was abducting children in the bright light of day. From Tenderfoot TV and iHeartRadio, this is La Monstra, a story of abomination and conspiracy. The story about the man who simply become known as. Lamaster. Listen for free on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. What I don't know. Sexually abusing my children through breakfast cereals. Yeah. Yeah. I'm Robert Evans. This is behind the ********. And we're talking this, this this is an episode that's gonna go in some bad places, some dark places. Miles, how are you doing today? Are just great, miles. Great. I'm so sorry, miles. I'm great. I love you. I'm so sorry. My outfit here. How do you feel about cereal? The, like grain breakfast thing. Yeah, yeah, yeah. The concept of the thing that you can, like, pour into a bowl, add milk. Yeah. Right, right. Love, you know, love it. Loved it as a child on board. Don't don't have time, don't have time for it now as an adult. Really, really don't have time for cereal. You know what it is? I have, like, I go through streaks, so I'll open a box of cereal and then this **** is like stale because I didn't eat it, like within however long supposed I never want more than about a bowl. Yeah. I mean, I'll do like, what happens is I'm high at the grocery store and I'm like, oh, I'm gonna eat rice crispy. Cereal, yeah. Yeah. And I'll eat like 1/2 a mixing bowl worth. Mm-hmm. And then I'll be so just disgusted because I use half and half as the milk that I put the cereal in the back of my pantry, Stoner ash. And then I'm like non and it's and it calls to me, yeah. I mean I'm the. I was the same way back when I smoked pot. Those were my cereal days because I would I would I would show up at like one of those 24 hour grocery stores at 1:30 in the morning and I would buy the largest thing of Marshmallow cereal and I would sit with the. Painful and a bong watching Star Trek the next generation and eating and it was and it ruled. Yeah, some great memories of those days. Ohh, how do you feel about granola? I my first thought is just a slang, you know, a pejorative for hippies. You know, granola, but the food, I like it. Are we talking good? Are we talking like, like. Bar or are we talking? No, I mean any any granola based product. You can do a lot with granola. I think we can all agree versatile, versatile granola bar love a nature valley ***** yogurt. Yeah, yeah, but yeah. I mean, I really the thing. I'm sorry that my. I'm so awkward. I mean, not only am I high, but, like, knowing you, I just don't like the path you're walking me down. Yeah, it's because it's just it's always just so ****** **. And you start. That's only serial. Like, what the **** you talking about, Robert? Cereal? Like serial killers, huh? Not serial killers. Worse than a serial killer, though. The fun thing about today's episode, miles, is that the ******* we're talking about has either helped to invent or popularize a variety of products. That I'm gonna guess. 100% of the people listening to the show have enjoyed. So everyone listening this to this has benefited in some way from something this man either invented or popularized. Now, the guy we're talking about was also a hugely prominent eugenicist and a prolific advocate of female genital mutilation. So yeah, we are right. This is gonna be like the elevator episode all over again. Yeah, we are talking about John Harvey Kellogg. Ohh yeah. Ohh yeah. This already. Ohh no, no. Wow. Honored. I feel like, I mean, because I know vaguely, like, it's all very ******* people. Most people have heard little bits of this story. It's like, yeah, he's like, yo, here's some sex ****. Hmm. And he made cornflakes to stop kids from *******. Yeah, like that's like one of the things I'm that, you know, I hear everyone. And from the cracked orbit here, I've heard that sort of line many times. From that it's much deeper and and much worse than that. OK. Yeah, yeah. So before we started on his life, we need to give a little bit of background about where this guy came from, because there's a lot of different strains of thought in in the American. Mind that kind of led to the birth of John Harvey Kellogg as the person that he became. Do you know much about Seventh-day Adventism? Yeah, I know a little bit about SDA. Yeah, yeah. I mean, but not much. Like, I just know about, like, you know, they're they give out food. They give out food. They believe that Saturday, not Sunday, is the Lord's Day. That's the 7th day part. And they, you know, they believe the apocalypse is imminent and they kind of have for a long time. Yeah. OK. Right, right, right. That's yes. Which today is like half of the religious right. But back in at it when they came about was kind of a new idea. Some of them also. Believe that going to doctors is evil. That's not like a a mainstream belief necessarily, but it's like a a a trend through Seventh-day Adventist thought, and we're gonna talk about why for a little bit. So the 7th Day Adventists are are a Millerite sect and the Millerites were a religious movement that started in 1816 when a Vermont farmer named William Miller converted from being kind of like a skeptical deist. Like a lot like like Ben Franklin, right? Like that sort of guy he got. He got pilled hard on the Baptist faith and. Because he was this kind of rational, skeptic guy. Once he became a believer, he had to believe that the Bible was fundamentally rational and internally consistent. Now it's not. So you can see how this would be a problem for him or how this would lead to problems. Well, he's set to work trying to prove the inherent rationality of the Bible, and this very quickly led him to a bad place. After about two years of this, he'd gone full conspiracy corkboard Pepe Silvia on the whole issue and convinced himself that the Bible was filled with numerical clues hidden in different books that revealed the exact date and time of the apocalypse. He's the first guy to do this. Like biblical numerology. He's like that. There's a hidden gate if you. Yeah. Wait, is he, like, one of the first who's like one of the first sort of conspiratorial numerologists? Like, I don't know if he's one of the breaking new ground to be, like, there's code in here. Yeah, there's hidden numbers in the Bible that predict the end times, right. He's like, I think pretty much the first guy who does that. Good for him. Yeah, no, I know, right. Good. Solid. That's kind of in a weird way. If I was at CPAC, I think I would drop that if that was like, I was related to that person, you know? I was the first guy to start counting the number of letters and words and verses of the Bible. Actually, no, mother. That's actually my great grandfather, dude. Yeah. Check Wikipedia, dude, don't tell me about secret Bible codes. My family invented secret Bible codes. Oh my God. Hey Bill, this guy's trying to tell me about biblical ******* numerology. Me, Joe Miller. I imagine the Millers moved from Vermont to New York at some point. Some they're they're just like, yeah, then they're in the elevators. Union, yeah, the elevator repair. So unlike everyone at CPAC, Miller was not a grifter. He was a he did believe in all of this. He wasn't, like, trying to get rich, and he waited a lot. Once he became convinced he'd figured out the date of the end of the world. He waited years to share his discovery with people because he didn't want to, like, create a panic. He decided the world was going to end in 1843, and as the year approached, he started to grow. Convinced that and like heard voices and stuff. Got God wanted him to warn people, right? So he he keeps quiet for a while but decides like God wants me to, to tell people the end is coming so they can have their souls saved. So in 1831 he starts preaching and giving public speeches, laying out his work, which was convincing to a lot of people, because back then, if you knew what numbers were, you seemed like a genius to at least half of the population. So a lot of people get get pulled in on this. Miller taught his growing circle of followers that everyone who wasn't saved. And the end date came would be incinerated along with the entire planet. He started preaching in Dresden, New York, and he soon hired an effective publicist and was giving speeches up and down the East Coast. By 1840 or so, he had a newspaper called the signs of the Times, which he used to spread his beliefs and mass to audiences who'd never have been able to hear him speak. His actual number of followers was probably in the low 10s of thousands, but Miller's ideas were influential and widely discussed in the popular culture of the day. The mainstream press wrote about his theories. Regularly as 1843 Drew Nye people started to ask, hey, what? When exactly, in 1843, should we expect all life on Earth to end in a fireball? Now? Miller's answer was precise, but not super accurate. He he said that it would occur in the Jewish year 1843, which was apparently between March 21st, 1843 and March 21st, 1844. I don't know enough about Judaism to tell you if that is the actual Jewish year of 1833. So that's what he said. Yeah. It's it's it's way far ahead. It seems wrong to me, but I that's what he was telling people at least. Yeah. Yeah. Because I think right now it's in the Hebrew year is 5781. Yeah. See, I I think he was. I I don't think he knew much about Judaism. He got away with that ****. Yeah, but no one did no one in America did back then. Yo, I love that, you know, cause like that would be I think what, 5603? Yeah, yeah. He's like, no, no, no, it's the Jewish nation 3014 for like, what the ****? Doing this? Yeah, like ease up, bro. That's ******* wild. Ohh, you know Jewish people, they love March, big month. Yeah, OK, fine. That's like when you know the first time that when you switch up calendars on someone for like, the arrival date that everyone should be like, this is **** but OK, maybe this one. Yeah. So spoilers here, miles, in case you haven't gotten to the end of your your 1843 history book, but the world did not end that year, or didn't or didn't. Not that I'm aware of. Signs point to no. So yeah, the fact that the all life didn't end in in in fire was a bummer for Miller and his followers. But being a humble man, he was the kind of person who was willing to admit that he had screwed up on his counting and missed the exact date of the apocalypse. Even so, he insisted, the end was still very much nigh. He just, like, flipped a digit or two. So he kept on preaching, and his followers mostly stayed dedicated to the message. One of them, a fellow named Samuel Snow, did his own calculations and suggested an alternate date for the end of all things, October 22nd, 1844, which he said was the Jewish Day of Atonement. And again, I don't know if it was, but that's what he said. Many Adventists clung to this in order to have hope that they've been right all along. When October 22nd passed without everyone and everything dying, they were heartbroken and this is a tough time for them. Now, the Millerites were definitely kind of a cult, but it has to be said, William Miller himself seems to have been a guy, like a decent person who truly believed what he was preaching, because when two end times dates passed without the times ending, he was consumed by shame and he spent the rest of his life hiding from the world. So that's good. Ohh, man, that's dope. Yeah, that's again. Yeah, that's dope. That's great. That's what you're supposed to do. That's what a scumbags of honor used to do. You know, the jig was up and you ****** off. Yeah. You thought the world was ending. You were wrong. You spent the rest of your life hiding in your basement. Now. ****. Good on you, right? Exactly. Yeah. And and to his followers, which had sort of one of the things people called them was Adventists. To the Adventists, this failed apocalypse. Prediction became known as the Great Disappointment, so they're real bummed out about this. Wow. But while William Miller had the good graces to hide his face from the world when he was proven wrong, the movement he'd spawned did not die out as a result of the great disappointment. In fact, it seemed to have only grown stronger in the face of unequivocal proof that its founder was wrong about everything. Adventists kept having meetings and kept trying to figure out when the world was going to end. In 1848, Ellen White and her husband, some guy, attended a conference of Adventists in rural New York. This was a year before William Miller's death, and about five years after he'd gone into hiding. So things were not going great for the Adventists, and the main topic of debate for the conference that year was whether or not Miller's prophecies had even been real. Like, obviously the date had been wrong, but like, was he completely full of **** or did he just, like, mess up some numbers a couple of times? So yeah, one chunk of the Adventists argued that Miller had been right and that Christ had come back on October 22nd, 183044, but that he'd done so in spiritual form and he hadn't destroyed the world. So he he was right about the date, but Jesus did it invisibly said nobody noticed. Ohh **** yes, it that's some good ****. Y'all. That's right, that's some 2021 logic. Like that's the logic that dictates all life. In America today, that still cutting edge and amazing and people took that ****. That's when it's a wrap. That's some Joe Biden and Trump switched faces and Trump is still the president, likely. Oh my God. Unbelievable. It's invisible. Yep. That makes yeah. Like, like if I had been at that meeting, I would have just stood up and started clapping like you got you did it. You invented America. You ************. You, You Beautiful *******. I was there. I'm getting this ****. That is, son. I was there when it make it down. T-shirts. ******* logic failed forever. Pulls is the breaking of the world. Yeah, so good. So another sect visible. **** ***. Oh my God. Again. And then it's continued by people who are unwilling to admit they're wrong. So now it becomes a religion because this group ego is unrelenting. It's so good. But now it was like, but how do they live so long? I want that eventually this will terminate in somebody firing nuclear warheads into the sky because invisible aliens or molesting our children or something, and that will be the end of all life on Earth and it's gonna be very funny in the last like 4 1/2 seconds. So there was another sect at the meeting, led by a guy named Hiram Edson, and they taught that the date Miller had calculated was the date of a heavenly event, not a terrestrial event, and that Christ had destroyed sin within what they called the Heavenly Sanctuary, which I think is basically heaven. In 1843, in order to prepare his way to his return to Earth. This became known as the Sanctuary doctrine, and it basically argued that Christ had gotten caught up in cleaning up heaven and it had delayed him from landing on Earth and destroying all life in in in Hellfire. So both of the explanations are invisible. Things happened and we were right, but it was invisible. They actually go against even what the beliefs are of. Like what? They believe Christ to be God, to be omnipotent, omniscient, omnipresent? It seems that way. So if you are omniscient, you all knowing all powerful and ******* everywhere and nowhere and all of that **** at once, yeah, you're like, hey ************ hold up, man, I gotta clean some **** up. Give me ******* a little bit, man. There's some ******* problems. If you only ******* knew. I'm serious. If you only ******* knew. I won't even tell y'all, but I'll be there in a second. I'm like, dude, I think Christ has a drug problem or something. Like, what the **** is going on? It's always *******. What's ******* doing up here? Is he, like, is he just doing a bunch of OK every night and waking up six hours late for things? Does he does he walk around with a spray bottle and a flashlight trying to find light fractals? Shooting bicine up his nose. I think we've both known about four jesuses. Yeah, yeah, I'm familiar with Christ. Christ type. Ohh God. So. So this meeting goes on and as I said, Ellen White is there. This lady, Ellen White, who has a little bit of a heads up in her early childhood, had a traumatic brain injury. This will become relevant later. So Ellen White is listening to these two different sects debate at this conference and she has a vision and I will remind you, she also has a traumatic brain injury and she has this vision which she becomes convinced as a prophecy from God tells her that the sanctuary doctrine is correct. So basically Herram goes up on stage and. Proposes this theory, and then she shouts out God just told me you're right and I'm a prophet. Now, from this point forward, Ellen and her husband are like become major fixtures within the Adventist movement, and she starts predicting dates for the coming earthly apocalypse. And these dates are all wrong. But by this point, Miller writes, we're used to their profits being wrong, and it didn't hurt her credibility in any way. By 1850, she made the very wise decision to urge her fellow Adventists to stop predicting the exact date of the end of the world, which is a good call. So that's where we are now. I'm leaving some stuff out, but that's the gist of the Ellen White story. Yeah, that's good. I mean, somewhat responsible, getting people real hot and ready and then just be like, you know what? Let's not do that. Yeah, let's just chill out for a second. I can be wrong about this. I can't be wrong about other things. Yeah, I like the you know what? God. Just. Yeah. Yeah. God jump. Yeah? Yeah. What? How? You didn't see it? This should just ******* happen. Just happened. How ******* dare you even, like, what were you about to say? Because I'm telling you, that's what ******* God just said, OK? This whole so in what was a great move from a branding standpoint, Ellen basically argued that all Adventists needed to know was that the end was coming soon and their job was to bring as many people as possible to Christ. Before that time, proselytization became an increasingly huge deal. From this point forward, one of the hotspots for Millerite recruit recruitment was Michigan, and that's where in 1852, an Adventist. Michigan is the West at this point. It's where people are moving. It's like the big, exciting new place. And it's also kind of like, you know, people. The reason white colonizers came to the North America in the 1st place was, like, they believed all sorts of weird religious **** that, like, wasn't quite cool over in Europe. So they came here to do their weird religious ****. And then when people had weird religious ideas in the new United States, they kind of moved to Michigan to do it because it was off the beaten path. Like, makes a lot of my relatives make a lot more sense. Yeah, that. That is the birth of Michigan as people being like, you know, we're a little bit too weird for the eastern seaboard. Let's let's move inland a little bit. Yeah. Yeah. You know what? Maybe we should go over here for a little. Yeah. So love y'all think it's gonna work over here? I think all the snow and Big Lakes will will make it real easy for us to to believe weird things about Jesus. So, man, who's just a little bit busy right now, he'll be back in one moment. Even Christ gets busy in 1852. An Adventist named Merritt. Cornell converted a fella named John Preston Kellogg, who is the subject of today's episode. The Kellogg family had moved to Michigan in the early 1840s, and their early years were pretty standard for white colonizers in the era John's first wife, Mary, had died of typhoid or consumption, or some weird old time. As she died horribly. John himself went through a series of religious conversions because there's all these weird little different niche faiths in Michigan, and in 1852, though, he settles on Seventh-day Adventism, things being what they were back then. His family converted with him because they didn't really have any other choice, and on February 26th, 1852, his family came to include a little baby named John Harvey Kellogg. Now John Harvey's earliest memories would have heavily involved the Adventist faith. In 1855, his father pledged $300.00, which is a lot of money in those days, to help start up the first Adventist printing press in Michigan. Because again, putting out magazines and pamphlets is a big part of the Adventist faith. That's how they recruit people, so he worked directly with James. White, who's the husband of Ellen White, who was, at that point basically the spiritual head of the faith. The press was established in Battle Creek, MI, a small city with a reputation for being accepting of weird religious movements. Making this pledge to fund the printing press inspired John Preston Kellogg to move his family across the state to Battle Creek. Little Johnny Kellogg was about four years old when this happened, and he was one of 16 children. Family finances were stretched in their very crowded household. His father operated a broom factory, but any spare money he had went to the church. His dad had a strict work ethic, and he demanded the same from his kids. John Harvey Kellogg later recalled his upbringing as sad and solemn, which is some very Michigan. I'll say that. Yeah. Sad and yeah. Well, kind of sounds like a bummer thing to be raised around as a kid. Like, is there any fun if, like, you're all just being like, ****? No, the apocalypse is coming and you have no money because your dad spends it paying for the religion to be able to make books because he's the ****** Banksy. Yeah. Yeah, ****. Banksy. So. And he was also pretty sick. John Harvey Kellogg was, for most of his childhood, he had a bad diet. His family ate really unhealthily, and he suffered from rickets for years. He grew up small and thin. He would top out at just 5 foot four. So he was he's not a healthy little kid. OK, and I'm gonna quote now from a book titled John Harvey Kellogg and the Religion of Biologic living by Brian Wilson. Doctor Brian Wilson quote. He would compensate for his physical shortcomings by energy, assertiveness and a burning ambition to do something with his life, although he knew this would not be easy for a boy on the frontier. According to Kellogg's later recollections, his parents prevented him from learning to read. Because given the imminence of the end of the world, acquiring such skills would be a waste of time. Yeah, the apocalypse is coming. What do you need books for? Yeah. Oh no. That's so ****** **. It's it's really, you know what I mean? Like to have such a ******* cynical worldview? Where it's like the world's ending. So honestly, like, I can just neglect everything that's and that's just it. But then you have like a kid who's, you know, maybe need some nutrients and like, yeah, you know how to read food, some reading. Yeah, it does. It does get better because when he's 12A, local pastor who may may have been James White decided that quote, if the Lord was going to come soon and in the world he would be more pleased if he found children in school, which. At least is a healthier set of logic than the world's ending. You don't need to learn how to read, right. So Kellogg, like, as soon as he's allowed to go to school, he basically spends an entire winter is like stuck in the neighborhood schoolhouse. He's a, he's an autodidact. He's very good at learning and he catches up very quickly. He just reads constantly. He's clearly a very smart boy quote, yes. So he compensated for his physical difficulties with kind of a relentless sense of self-confidence as well. He was loud and assertive from a young age 1. Minister, who knew him at the time, described him as a bright, sturdy, active, wide awake boy. In 1863, when he was 12 years old, his mother asked him what he wanted to be when he grew up, Brian Wilson writes. Quote he promptly yelled anything but a doctor. Apparently, shortly before his mother's question, John Harvey and some other boys had pressed their faces against a neighbor's window to witness the bloody spectacle of a local sawbones practicing his art on one of their playmates lying on a kitchen table. In the wake of this episode, Kellogg remembered I abhorred the idea of the medical profession. Did not like bad medicine and the bloody surgery that just a few years later the young boy would find himself a famous doctor and a surgeon at that must have given the elderly Kellogg a chuckle for. In addition to his childhood discussed at the sight of blood, he had been, at the age of 11, nothing more than an undersized boy working in his father's Battle Creek Broom factory, distinguished only by his exceptional manual, dexterity, sorting broom corn, and the fact that his family belonged to a struggling apocalyptic sect. Significantly, Dr Kellogg followed this memory with that of another shortly after his mother asked him about his future. Life. The boy had come upon her, praying for his future. I went in and knelt down beside her, and she placed her hand on my head as we knelt there, and she dedicated me to the Lord for Human service. So. That's kind of the pivotal moment in this kid's life. She asked him what he wants to be. He says I don't want to be a doctor. And then a couple of days later, he doesn't want to be a doctor because he sees what doctors are doing in the 1860s, right? Pretty ugly. And then a few days later, he catches his mom praying and she, like, puts her hand on him and dedicates him to serving the human race and God. Robert you know who else will serve the human race and God? Definitely not Raytheon. Absolutely not, Raytheon. But both Theon's only motto is we do not serve God. It's time for some ads. Yeah, it is time for an ad or two. Maybe 3, maybe 4. Mint Mobile offers premium wireless starting at just 15 bucks a month. And now for the plot twist. Nope, there isn't one. Mint Mobile just has premium wireless from 15 bucks a month. There's no trapping you into a two year contract. You're opening the bill to find all these nuts fees. 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It's been like two months since I got LASIK laser eye surgery and my vision still 2020. So many things about my daily life has changed. I don't have to worry about putting on a mask and my glasses fogging up. I don't have to take out contacts at night or put them in the day. I don't have to, like, worry all the time when I'm traveling. Like, how many contacts do I have by go swimming at the lake during the summer? Something I like to do, go to the beach or whatever. I don't have to worry about losing a contact or, you know, bringing swimming glasses or something. With me, everything is just easier. And getting it done was easy too. You know, I went in, I had my consultation, they told me I was a good candidate and then I went back in couple of days later about it being about a boom. You know, my eyes were perfect. So LASIK Plus is a leader in laser vision correction in the United States. They have over 20 years in the industry and more than two million treatments performed. If you want to start your LASIK plus journey, you can get $1000 off when treated in September. That's 500 per eye. So visitmylasikoffer.com to schedule your free. Consultation now. We're back. So yeah. From that moment forward, his mom dedicates him to human service, and Kellogg would later recall that basically, from that point forward, he never had any desire but to serve the Lord and the human race. He got his first chance about, you know, several months later when James White noticed how intelligent this kid was and asked him to come be unpaid labor at the Adventist publishing house in town. John Harvey became an apprentice, and he spent the next four years being drawn closer and closer into the inner circle of the prophetess Ellen White. He was promoted rapidly, and it kinda seems like they they decided this kid's so smart he's gotta do something for the faith. We're going to, like, groom him for leadership within within our weird little apocalyptic cult. He was promoted rapidly, and by the time he was 16, he'd been made an editor of the Adventist newspaper. John Harvey loved religion, and he particularly loved what most people would call the boring nishta tales of theological debate. His love of this brought him into direct contact with Ellen White, who took a liking to him, her husband eventually. Fighted in the boy that his wife had received a vision from God that John Harvey Kellogg was to play a crucial role in the Lord's work. So you can kind of see how this grooming process is going. Yeah. Yeah. Jesus, that's a lot of pressure. A lot of pressure for the Lord lot. They they're they're really putting a lot on this kid's shoulders. And from age 17 to 20, John Harvey Kellogg continued his work on the Adventist Review and Herald. He also started teaching grammar school before he'd actually finished high school himself, which is, I guess, the thing you could do back in those days, he wasn't TA. And you're like, really teaching college kids. Yeah. While you're still in high school. Yeah, yeah, but to wrap that degree up. But here's the deal, kids. Let's learn another letters here. He was, by all accounts, a good teacher. And for several years, it was clear to everyone that John Harvey's future was going to lie in education. He even told everyone he'd received a waking vision from God that this was to be his calling. But when Johnny was 20, Ellen Whitehead herself, yet another vision. This one was that John Harvey Kellogg was going to become a physician. So he's wants to be a teacher. He really likes teaching. He's this is the whole like thing. He's he's patterning his life for for years and then. The Prophet has with a brain injury, sees God tell her this kid's going to be a doctor, the thing he least wants to be in the entire world. So this brings me to another long digression, miles. Because physician meant meant a different thing to Ellen White than it does to you or me, and then it did to most people in the United States when she said it, right? What the ****? Yeah. How when when you say doctor, you imagine like a guy who treats illnesses with a variety of medicines, right? There's no ******* way that there you have any other definition that isn't a doctor Dre or Doctor Pepper. Joke of what a ******* doctor is. Her. Her. Her. Definition of Doctor was a guy who gives people different kinds of baths. Yeah, to explain why, miles, we have to talk about what we have to talk about an intellectual movement in America in the mid 1800s called sectarian medicine. So. Medicine in the early 1800s was mostly nonsense and poison, right? We talked about this a lot on the show, but it's important to note that a lot of regular people recognize that doctors were bad at their jobs, like the fact that they were 1830s medical treatments were basically just bleeding people and feeding them mercury. And this was bad. And a lot of people at the time were like, kind of seems like the doctors don't do anything to kill people. Yeah. I and then, like, something was wrong with your, like, a cough and they sawed your foot off. Yeah. It doesn't seem like they're good at this. Yeah, so it's it's like a in a big like purgatives are a big part of medicine. Like the idea that like you're sick, you must be filled with poison. Will give you things that make you vomit and **** constantly. Ohh, He died of vomiting and ********. Huh? Well, The thing is man, supposed to do the opposite thing. We guess we'll dial it back next time. Alright, so you got the same thing? Alright, here we go. Here we go. Do a little less this time or a little more. Maybe we didn't give him enough. Yeah. Now, such treatments were called heroic medicine because the doctors who saw what they were doing, which was poisoning people, as engaging in a violent battle with disease. So, like, yeah, we're giving people these poisons, mercury and strychnine and the like. But these poisons are necessary because you have a disease, and the poison has to fight the disease, right? Which you can see is is both raw but not on the wrong track of thought because it is like, like cancer. Chemotherapy is bad for you. You don't like you wouldn't want to get chemo. Right. But it's a a poison that kills the worst poison, you know? Right? Exactly. So there is medicine that work. Like, you can see, the doctors at the time there weren't entirely on the wrong thinking track. They were just like, but you don't give people mercury because they have a cough. No. Yeah. I wonder, what the **** were they seeing where they're like, Oh yeah, that **** works, dude. I'm, you know, that ****. Hit him with some more Mert and they had stuff that did work too. Yeah, yeah, yeah. I mean, it's it's it's hard time. Like you gotta look at a data set. At some point and be like, man, my bad marriage isn't. I don't think there were not a lot of data sets at the time. Yeah, no, but I mean in this in their own, like, even just thinking back, like, they'll look back and they're like, I have lost a lot of people and I can actually kind of remember only a couple times I helped, like, saved someone. Seriously. I think the level of drunk that every doctor was, it played a role in this. Yeah, because you're like a weird ******* butcher slash, like star of a Wes Craven film. Yeah, like, yeah. So you're hammered and on opium. All the time, yeah. And you're letting the neighborhood kids watch you cut their friends leg off through a window? It's all weird scene. Yeah, it's it's not great. So yeah, this is heroic medicine. The sawing people's legs and poisoning them. Things heroic where you ******* know I'm a ******* hero. OK? Jesus Christ, doc. And a lot of people thought this was ********. And throughout the 8, mid 1800s, a new school of medical thought arose that rejected this and focused. Instead, on the healing power of nature. And this came to be known as sectarian medicine. So Orthodox physicians would use heroic medicine to battle illness. Sectarian doctors would use natural remedies to bring the body back into balance. And this may not sound too bad, right? Because there are like, I don't know, witch Hazel does some **** like, right. Tylenol comes from a plant that you can, you can make a tea that'll do the same thing as there's all sorts of natural remedies, comfrey and Yarrow and plantain, that really do have beneficial effects, which is why, like, Native American. Madison worked a lot better than many kinds of Western medicine. They're not your friends leg off? Yeah. Your friend's leg off? Yeah. But that's not what they were talking about when they talked about natural remedies. They what they were. It was what they thought was natural, which was not like, yeah, so. The natural physicians, these sectarian doctors, believe that keeping people healthy was about restoring natural balance. And some of this was, in fact, good medicine. A lot of it meant like, well, people need to get enough sunlight, people need to get enough exercise, people need to get enough vitamins. That's not bad, you know? Right track. So far, OK. But sectarian doctors also believed a lot of nonsense themselves because people didn't know anything back then. They boiled nearly all health problems down to an imbalance with one of six things. Air diet, evacuations, sleep cycles, exercise, and Peace of Mind. So one of the most popular physicians of the sectarian school was a fellow named Sylvester Graham, father of the Graham cracker. Although you would not have wanted to eat the Graham crackers that he made for reasons that we will get into. My God. This is gonna be such a good episode. Miles here. Yeah. Ohh. It's it gets so bad. So remember when I said sectarian doctors focused on natural medicine and bringing the body back into balance? Hmm. Well, one thing a lot of them believed was that the body got taken out of balance when you ***********. Because obviously you're ejaculating, right? You're you're losing a fluid, which must be taking your body out of balance and making you sick, right? Right. I think that's where the logic. Mine started and then keep it. You gotta keep it in no FAP. Yeah no this is actually a very no FAP episode. It is the same logic that proud boys ohh like that like you will be levitating at a certain point like you that keep more that you'll you'll go crazy and kill yourself if you come no. But if you don't though, like aren't you then allowing yourself they had power out of that part. Well actually some of them did believe that the reason people in the Bible lived to be 800 years old were perfect balance and never came. So yes, actually miles that's exactly right. They love virgin logic in cell logic. I'm actually gonna live forever. I mean John Harvey Kellogg's spoilers is an end cell. So hopefully we're going. I'm going to quote from a write up in the Journal of Technology and Culture about. The the the evolution of of sectarian physicians beliefs about ************ quote the source of these beliefs can be traced back to an 18th century Swiss physician. SAD Tissu tissu taught that one of the basic causes of illness and death was the wasting away of body energy. The most dangerous of such wastes, and yet the one that could be controlled, was that brought on by ************. Those who *********** would soon have a cloudiness of ideas, suffer a decay of their bodily power, experience acute pains in their head, be afflicted. The pimples on their face and eventually lose the power of generation. Females were likely to be subject to hysterical fits. Violent cramps, Osher ulceration of the matrix. I don't know what the matrix meant in this situation. I'm guessing that's like the uterus, but like, yeah, that's what a ******* term. Oh my God, the matrix. Yeah, it's also the opposite of correct, just in terms of what ************ can do for cramps. But yeah, right. Yeah. So, tissues ideas reached America at the end of the. 18th century, through the works of a guy named Benjamin Rush, who was the dominant medical voice in the United States during the revolutionary period and was a signer of the Declaration of Independence. Rush taught that all disease could be reduced to one basic causal model. Bodily energy either did. Either the DIM mutation in or increase of such energy led to disease. Dismutation of energy led to direct debility, while increase led to indirect ability. Once the nervous system was weakened, it was susceptible to illness and disease. So the whole idea is balanced. You lose balance one way or the other, you're going to get sick, right? Rush concluded, based on observation that sex was a major cause of nervous excitement and was thus extremely dangerous. So basically, like, people seem to get excited when they're *******. That can't be good. Uh, no, none of that. None of that. So you can't have that. The matrix is at stake. The matrix could go out of whack. No, but I just actually looked it up. It is. It's just a medical term, but he's just using the first part and just referring to it as the matrix. The matrix. But I was hoping uterus. Yes. Yeah, I was hoping I was a part of the uterus. I was hoping that it was something that, ah, damn it, I mean, the movie The Matrix does kind of take place in like a robot uterus filled with people. OK. That are also batteries. So that are also batteries like like babies in a uterus. Right. So, OK, I understand biology. Two doctors just talking to each other right now. Very, very normal. Yeah. So, Rush, can you see the matrix? So Rush concluded again that that sex was a cause of nervous excitement, and thus careless sex would result in seminal weakness, painful urination, tuberculosis, Vertigo, anxiety, and death. From his theorizing burst a Galaxy of American come doctors, all with their own theories on why ************ was bad and how to stop it. Edward Bliss Foot, which is an amazing name, believed that ************ disrupted the natural animal magnetism between the sexes. Sylvester. Graham believed that overstimulation of the nervous system was the cause of all disease, and since Graham believed this was the case, the ultimate preventative medication was to live a life that was as boring as possible. This meant no ************ because that excites you and meant the absolute minimum amount of sex necessary to procreate. And it also meant eating and drinking only the very blandest things grand band grease, salt, condiment, spices, tea, coffee, tobacco, and alcohol for his followers, he cautioned that. Only cold water was healthy to drink. He created the Graham cracker, which was initially sugarless and flavourless, to be a food that would stimulate the body as little as possible and help you poop in order to cut down on sexual urges. Hey, yeah, yeah, my kid was jerking off. Can I get some of those **** crackers that'll help help you stop that crackers. The ditch. Terrible. And make them poop also. Wait. Are the blandness of blandness of life. Is our secret, is the spice of life. Because if you're out of balance, if you're happy, you're out of balance. If you're excited, you're out of balance. If you experience a moment of joy, you're out of balance. And that will make you die, right? So it's like purgatory. You know, let's just be in physical purgatory. Life should be an endless Gray expanse of non experience. Ohhh. Yeah, right, Andrew. And like, the logic of like and like and also eat these crackers, man. Yeah, eat these crackers. They'll make you ****. And they taste bad. They're honestly what? You won't **** if you eat these. I won't **** if I have diarrhea. Yeah. What do you mean? No, no, no, no, no, no. They're full of fiber. Like, yeah, I mean, I know, but I'm just, I haven't been regular because I haven't been ************ enough. One of the things he's right about is like the the diet at this point involved a lot of like pork and grease. And like peoples bowls were often in bad shape. And he was like, sure. Yeah. Having enough fiber is good for your health. Yeah. Also never ****. Yeah, it's like I was with you the no, I don't know, never **** and no salt or flavor. Yeah, even Catholic priests don't do that. I mean, they also **** children, even if I think there's something. There's some kind of something. Yeah, something. But not for the followers of Sylvester Graham. Now, doctors like Graham were not just physicians and like the scientific sense, although they saw themselves that way. They were also moralists. These guys were religious crusaders who believed their medical advice was morally upright as well. And that that was a big part of, like, that's why we don't need to do research to prove this stuff. It's morally correct. So it's medically correct, you know? Yeah. Yeah, it's right. That must have sucked when, like, microscopes and **** was just, like, dunking on all this ****. Yeah, they it really was a bummer for these guys, right? Like, I mean, yeah, there's still a lot of them. It's why eventually. The South African COVID variant will, will will become a problem. Boy, that's another episode. That's another episode. So yeah, Graham was a Presbyterian minister and a temperance crusader, as well as a medical guru. Brian Wilson explains quote many people during the time believe that God visited people with disease as punishment for moral sins. Sectarian health reformers, on the other hand, believe that whereas moral sins led to spiritual diseases, it was physiological. Sense that lead to diseases of the body. And just as spiritual disease could be avoided by following the 10 Commandments, so too physiological sins could be avoided by heating the laws of life. Moreover, both kind of sins ultimately had implications for one's personal salvation. For according to Doctor Larkin B Coles, it is as truly a sin against heaven to violate a law of life as to break one of the 10 commandments. So if you masturbate, if you eat salt, you are sinning against God as much as if you murdered. Because you're violating the natural order of of your body, right? It's a moral. It's a physiological sin. They invented a whole new type of setting. Yeah. It's. Oh my God. It's called being satisfied. Yeah, it's called enjoying even a second of your miserable, dirt farming life. Yes. Yeah, that's it. That's that's the secret, man. That's the secret. We should all just be miserable. Yeah, it rules. I love Western culture. Yeah. And it's such a for all these guys, like jacking off over the ancient Romans. The Romans would have listened to be like, are you *******? Yeah. What is wrong with you people? The only reason to live is to eat salt and ****. You ******* serious? You're drunk all the time. You'll get this guy out of my *******. I'm gonna kill this guy. What the **** did he just say to me? You're a doctor. You're a doctor. No, Sir. Go peddle your my last doctor prescribed me a bunch of *******. Yeah, this is the Roman Empire my doctor just prescribed me. Come, you'll have, you know. And I'm living large and in charge, Sir. Graham ISM swept the country a little bit like like in the years kind of immediately before John Harvey Kellogg was born, and it was still an extremely influential strain of medical thought. When he grew into a young man. It was very popular among British religious hardliners like the Adventists. Hmm. It was quickly followed by another great advance in medical science hydropathy. This was a proposed medical science based on the research of an Austrian, which should have keyed everyone into the fact that it was a bad idea anyway. This Austrian whose name? Price Nets believe that fresh water cured all ailments. You could take it internally via hydration or through a wide variety of baths. Some of these were traditional baths or showers, but others were weird as hell. Wet blanket wraps and multi hour long cold and hot soaks. Hydropathy got huge in the late 1840s and was still a big deal in the 1850s when James and Ellen White moved their ***** to Battle Creek, MI. And this is the point where all of the 7th Day Adventist stuff we've talked about came to intersect with all the weird sectarian medicine stuff we've talked about. At first, the whites were very anti medicine, Brian Wilson writes. Quote Since an accident had left her an invalid for much of her childhood, that's the brain injury. Ellen White had been intensely concerned about her own health, and so throughout her early ministry she had been plagued by health problems. Sometimes these were so serious that her friends despaired of her life. And at least one of these occasions her friends rallied around her to pray for her recovery, which when it occurred was interpreted as nothing short of one of the miracles promised for the last days, accordingly healing exclusively through prayer. Avoiding doctors and medicine came to be seen as an act of faith. In fact, in 1849, Ellen White published a broadside targeted at Adventists entitled to those who are receiving the seal of the Living God. It warned that if any among us are sick, let us not dishonor God by applying to earthly physicians, but apply to the God of Israel. So great. That's just like, stuff. What's the God of Israel's batting average? Yeah. How's Israel doing in the 1840s? How is that one? Doing against foot chopper. Mm-hmm. Yeah, I think food choppers got the edge. Sad food choppers got the edge over the God. Really? OK, well, that's a big so that's a big for a time, Adventists believed that Ellen White could bring the Lord's healing upon people just by praying for them. This. Came to an end in the mid 1850s when one of her followers in Camden, NY, died after refusing medical treatment in favour of prayer. Ellen White called the reports that her preaching helped kill this woman. Groundless, but from that point forward. He started telling her followers that faith healing should be balanced with actual medical care. So she backed the **** pedals once she gets someone killed. Which, again, these grifters are so much more moral people than than our modern ones. I don't even know. Maybe not fair to call her a grifter. I do think she believed but like, clearly felt bad that she got someone killed. Yeah, she at least was like, oh **** I gotta I ooh boy. Yeah. OK. You know, man, that was kind of a big swing, huh? I think that was an L for me. Yeah. Alright. Yep. Chalk that one on there. Yeah, you can write it down. I'll take it. So she was also, she's so she, she starts embracing medicine, but she's not embracing, you know, heroic medicine. She starts embracing these weird people like Graham and stuff like hydropathy. And because she's into Graham, she gets huge on healthy living. And this is like kind of ties into the the fact that Adventists accepted the apocalypse was not as imminent as they'd initially believed. So they had to take care of their bodies as part of their being right with God. And there's a bunch of theological arguments about this, but basically like. One of the things that happens is that Adventist belief kind of lashes on all of this Grammas stuff about you gotta be a vegetarian. You can't eat salt, you can't eat anything good, you know? Right. So they all start to adopt those beliefs as well. So this is what they kind of figured it out though, that because the blue isn't the Blue Zone diet actually known for like longer life expectancy and that's why, I mean, so is the Mediterranean, right? Right, right. Or not to say that he was, you know, on omniscient and knowing that, but like, yeah. Not that, then. Or to just look, I'm all spice and salt, baby. But yeah, one of the most healthy things they figure out because, like, pork is a horrible meat for your health, terrible for you. Like, you should not be eating pork. I we all love the way it tastes, but we shouldn't be eating it. It's bad. No. Yeah. Yeah. And it was the main meat that was people's diet in this part of the North America at the time. They're just eating A cause. It's easy to make a lot of it. Right? Right. Beef's not great for you, either. Like, Mediterraneans eat a lot of meat, but it's not primarily beef and pork and stuff. You know, land. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah, exactly. Gotta get it. Gotta get it. Look, gotta healthiest diets aren't necessarily vegetarian, but they're definitely not eating nothing but bacon. That's not Buffalo Wild Wings either. Exactly. So, yeah, like, the American diet at this point is really bad. And it's true that, like, they start to notice, like, part of why they get so into these medical beliefs is like, they adopt these grammas health beliefs and they all feel better because they're eating healthy. Like it is, like, better for you. He might be on to something, but then he's, like, saying it's not really the diet. He's like, no, it's the come that you've kept inside. Well, yeah, we'll get to that. So this is I I I keep going back to all of these different strains of thought because this is how John Harvey Kellogg grows up. This is what he grows up believing. Right. And he didn't, you know, because in his early childhood, they haven't quite adopted these grimmest beliefs. Yet sickness is a constant factor in his childhood, his father, and it's also not trusting doctors as a big factor. So his father has, like, lifelong. Chronic near fatal diarrhea because of an eye infection that a local doctor treated by making a fly bite him, which caused his tongue to swell up and permanently injured. So, like when, you know, say that whole sequence of words out loud again, that's so crazy. Chronic, debilitating diarrhea that he got from an eye infection when a doctor prescribed an insect bite for an eye infection. Flea bite for your eye infection, Doc. Doc, I gotta, I gotta tell you, man, this is. I believe I trusted you. My eye is a ******* worse and my diarrhea is off the ******* meat hook right now. I can't, you know, medicine. What the ****? Where did you get that bug? There's a lot of unanswered questions here. So obviously, also his dad's first wife dies of tuberculosis. In 1847, his first daughter died of a lung infection, which the doctor blamed on Worms. And then his dad, like, sits with the doctor to cut up his dead daughter, just to prove like, no, there ain't no worms in that dead girl like it's dad. No, it's all, Oh my God. No. No worms. No worms. The doctor was wrong. Yes, it was tuberculosis. He was giving her like poison because he thought her lungs were filled with worms. And then he poisoned her to death. I'm gonna take a wild guess. Were worms over there. Bug? Bug focused Dr where is bug yet? Yeah, you know who won't murder your child with strict 9 because he thinks their lungs are full of worms. No, Raytheon, they'll murder your child with an honest to God knife missile. 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I went in, I had my consultation. They told me I was a good candidate and then I went back in a couple of days later. But a Bing bada boom, you know, my eyes were perfect. So LASIK Plus is a leader in laser vision correction in the United States. They have over 20 years in the industry and more than two million treatments performed. If you want to start your LASIK plus journey, you can get $1000 off when treated in September. That's 500 per eye. So visit my LASIK offer. Dot com to schedule your free consultation now. Yeah, we're back. So John Harvey Kellogg, by the time he comes into the world, his dad was not trusting of mainstream physicians, which would make sense. He buys the church's lines on medicine. And when the church gets really into hydropathy, so does John Harvey Kellogg's family. Now, John Preston, his dad, subscribed to the Water Cure Journal and John Harvey grew up with hydropathy is kind of the go to treatment for everyone in his family, which makes sense because it is healthier for you. And for example, bug bites. Honestly, where the **** what's in world of medicine is that it's all about the other who's the godfather of bug doctory? And where the ****? Who's the, who's the bug supplier? I don't know. We're we're missing some pieces of that story like that's. I mean there's a whole there's a whole consultation scene that I must see be acted out. Doctor bug? I think you may not think you may not be the best position in town. Sounds like you got a scorpion in your brain. What? Scorpion talking. Get the bones. OK, I'm getting the **** out of here. So here's how John Harvey recalled like his medic. Imagine if you actually had something wrong with your *******. We're going to put a new feed up there. Put all the bugs I can in your ***. Ohh yeah, I seen this. Not enough bugs. Bugs in your not enough arachnids in there. Oh my God. Yeah. You swear? You swear he's solved your thing? Yes. My sister had a baby after she saw him. She was scared not to. Also, you know, I think maybe they were just having an affair. Yeah, you might have. They made it seem like a miracle because her husband went to go see him when he had trouble urinating and he, the doctor suggested a bug bite on his **** ****. Yeah, so here's how John Harvey Kellogg described the hydropathy treatments he received, and he was sick as a kid. Quote. I remember very well how violently I shivered when, at the age of 10, I was wrapped in a cold, wet sheet pack to bring out the eruption in an attack of measles. I shall never forget the crude shower bath with which its health barrel tank arranged over a pan with perforated bottom, through which cold water from a deep well poured in frigid streams on my body until the tank was empty because the door to the little chamber in which I was confined stuck. So fast that I could not escape, and no one came to my relief until the tank was empty. So they they waterboarded this little kid is like medicine. That was their treatment. Was like, we're gonna lock you in a tank and pour freezing water on you for hours. What the ****? How does that even get? Hydractive. OK, thanks, hydropathy. Thanks, hydropathy. So he's being he's being like Al Qaeda tortured. Like CIA style tortured. But it's like, yeah, you got measles. Hi, I'm Gina Haspel, director of hydropathy. You know what? No, I I will say this at Guantanamo. No ******* measles. Not one case. Not one case. You're welcome. You'll tell me. You tell me. Jim from the office was right. We should be thankful for the CIA. Thank you. Take that. And that's some good news from John Krasinski. So right around the same time and John Harvey's early adolescence, his family expanded their medical interest into Graham ISM. Now, before becoming grammis his father, his family diet had been had included huge quantities of pork. But afterwards the whole Kellogg family were strict vegetarians. An Adventist minister who was a friend of the family introduced them to an early prototype of Graham Crackers. By the time John Harvey Kellogg was a young adult helping to run Ellen White's newspaper, the Whole Adventist church had plunged. Headlong into sectarian medicine. See, dude, Ellen White had a vision in the early 1860s. She had already been advising her followers to avoid alcohol, tobacco, caffeine, and fatty foods. But now she'd received a prophecy from God and he told her that everyone needed to be a vegetarian, get lots of exercise and rest, drink tons of water, and engage in medical baths. It's likely she was actually influenced in this by the behaviors adopted by her close friends, the Kellogg's, and other people in Battle Creek. It's kind of hard to tell, like, exactly where this this like, which way this flowed. It was probably both ways. And there may have been, like, around some of them, yeah. And there may have been something of a grifter pin spun to this because hydropathy becomes very popular and Ellen White adopts it as part of the faith, claims. God has told her that this is like the true medicine. And then she opens a medical school that the church runs to teach doctors hydropathy. And they call this the Western health reform because the School of the Americas. Kinda. So it officially opened its still unfinished doors on September 5th, 1866. Since this was her biggest new project, she told her new brightest follower, John Harvey Kellogg, that he needed to go there. See, she'd had a vision that he was meant to be a physician, not a teacher. John Harvey. Like I said that a little earlier, too, John Harvey hated the sight of blood, and he had no desire to go to medical school, but he was gradually kind of forced into doing this because it was God's command, right? So this kid wants to be a teacher, winds up learning to be a bath doctor, and he doesn't really want to do this now. He hated the medical school that his church created because he was actually a smart person, and he was intelligent enough to know that all of the stuff they were teaching was ******* nonsense. He graduated with no effort, since all of his classes involved zero medical science. The headmaster of the medical school believed that organic chemistry was a lie by the devil, so like, there was not a lot of hard science going off in there. Ohh, just graduating with flying colors. Your whole test is just water with a question mark. And you write. Yes. You nod. Congratulations, doctor. You just take a sip of water and go. And that was my dissertation. You know, it would be good if I was locked in a room filled with this for hours where no one could hear my screams. That seems like it would treat, I don't know, cancer. I love that. This, this kid's going somewhere. He's going to save the planet. This kid's got to fix everything. You're a prodigy. Didn't even go through. And an applesauce base you straight to water. You see, with these you can learn from him, guys. Everyone can look around. Look at this guy. Yeah, Jimmy, all that oil you've been pouring up people's ********. That was the wrong. Yeah, yeah, it's water. Yeah, bug guy. I don't even gotta tell you. Where are you putting those scorpions? Stop that. Yeah, none of us, none of us have ****** right? For a week now. So he realizes that this medical school his church creates is is complete ********. But his time at Ellen White's nonsense school of long baths ignited a very real interest in medical science, doctor Brian Wilson writes quote. John Harvey's time at the college did whet his appetite for further medical training, this time at Orthodox medical institutions, an idea he proposed to James White upon his return to Battle Creek. Elder White was reluctant to endorse this project, his attitude being that training at some Doctor Mill. Was all an Adventist physician really needed? But Kellogg prevailed, and with whites financial backing, he attended first the College of Medicine and surgery at the University of Michigan and then Bellevue Hospital in New York City, which at the time was the finest teaching hospital in the United States. Here, Kellogg not only learned the latest in regular medicine, including new drug therapies, but under the tutelage of Austin, Flint and EG Janway was also introduced to advances in physiotherapy and surgery. Intensely proud of his achievement, Kellogg graduated with a regular MD from Bellevue in 1875. Later in the 1880s, Kellogg, now completely over his disgust of blood, would take up the practice of surgery in earnest, training first in New York and then, in 1883 in Vienna with Adolf Adolf Bill Roth, who Kellock characterized as the greatest surgeon of the 19th century. And everyone seems to agree he was. John Harvey Kellogg was an incredibly gifted surgeon like he is. He is a nonsense doctor, too, but he's also a deeply gifted Reddit regular surgeon who is respected within his field for his talents. He's a very he's kind of like Ben Carson, I was gonna say. This sounds familiar. There's a lot of Ben Carson energy going on with this can actually good at ******* surgery, but don't read anything else. Yeah, he's he's anything else. So he becomes an actual doctor and returns to Battle Creek from getting his MD in 1875 and immediately joins the staff at his religions nonsense medical school again. And it became immediately apparent that no one else who worked there knew anything about medicine as the only member of his staff, of the staff of this again. Medical College who was not a gibbering maniac. Kellogg was almost immediately promoted to Superintendent of the Institute, which was probably the best call you could have made. Like you've got the real doctor and the guy who believes Satan invented chemistry. Yes, we picked the real nutzy here. Thanks. And then that doctor is like, well, I guess the student has become the teacher. Yeah. Thanks, professor. Thanks, professor. Chemistry, where did you go? Talk to bug. You know you're fired. Yeah. So, uh, yeah, he was like 26 years old when he becomes the Superintendent of the Institute. And he agreed to take the job both because the prophet told him it was God needed him to do, but also because he would have control over the institute and he would be able to reform it. So Kellogg was, again, not super psyched about this college. He described it as an empirical institution, a sort of mixture of water cure, homeopathy and eclecticism, with no scientific direction. And so when he took control, he vowed to turn it into an internationally recognized medical institution. Devoted to a wide range of treatments based on hard science, his first active director was to change the institute's name to the Battle Creek Sanitarium. He actually invented the word sanitarium. The editor of his old newspaper complained about this, pointing out that no one would know what he meant by using it, because he just created the word. But Kellogg argued that sanitarium was a better name than Sanatorium. See, a sanatorium was a place where sick people came to be cured. That's not what Doctor Kellogg wanted to make. He wanted to create a place where people learned. But to stay well, Kellogg's vision was a mixture of like a quack hospital in quack medical school, but also a real hospital in something akin to a health spa. Like, he wanted to turn this into a place where people would come to learn how to be healthy as well as come when they were sick. And he was. He was again. There's a lot of good ideas this guy has, one of which is that you don't the the idea is not to treat people for illnesses, it's to keep them healthy, right? Which is fair, like a reasonable thing for a documentative medicine. It's just. Exactly, yeah. And he kind of he turns the sanitarium into like a preventative medicine spa where like particularly rich people can come and like get all these different treatments designed to keep them healthy. One of his first executive acts was to start placing full page ads in professional journals, including the AMA's Journal Advertising. The sanitarium is a place where people could take vacations not just to treat their ailments, but to get healthier. Brian Wilson writes quote along with all the luxuries of Grand Hotel the San was touted as offering a carefully. 100 vegetarian diet a variety of physical therapies including rational hydropathy, Swedish movements, calisthenics, breathing exercises, and eventually electric, light and heat therapies. Now, there's a lot of questions that that paragraph raises. I bet you're wondering, First off, what rational hydropathy might include. I'm going to let her write up from history.com explain that. In a 1907 ad in Good Housekeeping magazine, the Battle Creek Sanitarium boasted of offering 46 kinds of baths. Some, like foot baths and sponge baths, were relatively conventional. But there were also options like the continuous bath, which was much like a regular tub bath, except that it could last, Kellogg wrote for many hours, days, weeks, or months, as the case may require. That's rational hydropathy. That's the rational. Yeah. Just stay in a bath for months. Yeah. Yeah. And they would, they would you could get up to use the restroom and you could get up to do things, but they would keep bathing you while you were standing and moving. Like that's what they meant by continuous bath. Wait. So you get up to take a dump and then they're just pouring buckets of water on you or. They always be bathing. Oh my God, come on. I advocated continuous bats as a treatment for skin diseases, chronic diarrhea, and a host of mental maladies including delirium, hysteria, and mania. I kind of think a weak spot that Doctor Kellogg would generally frame this as paying attention to the latest medical developments. But many of the fads he embraced had little scientific basis. For example, he became a disciple of Horace Fletcher, a health guru who traced many health problems to poor chewing discipline. Fletcher believes people needed to chew. Each bite at least 40 times. Sometimes you'll hear 34 before swallowing. As a result, Doctor Kellogg would lead dinners in the sanitarium with renditions of the chewing song, the chorus of which was Choo Choo Choo. That is the thing to do. Ohhhhhh **** you, you. Sounds like a hoot. Catalog was a believer in what he called auto intoxication, which resulted from the putrefaction of undigested meat in the bowels. He believed that auto intoxication was behind virtually every illness of the bowels. To fix this, the bowels had to be cleansed. His sanitarium offered patients a truly dizzying variety of enemas. He believed, quote, more people need washing out than any other remedy. This was again not an uncommon health treatment at the time, but as usual, Kellogg took things further than anyone else. Traditional enemas involved a pint or two of liquid being, you know, put in your **** right? Yeah. John Harvey's enemas were administered by a special machine of his own design that could pump 15 quarts of water per minute through his patients bowels. What the ****? More is better, baby. Wait. Nearly four ******* gallons a minute. ******* what? What the ****? Absolutely outrageous. Yeah. You gonna ******* pressure wash? You're just whole **** like that. Yeah, he's basically taking dude pressure washer from like a car wash, right? Shooting up his own design. He just designed a weird nozzle to put in your *******. Yeah. Otherwise it's the pressure washer that the city uses when there's ******* graffiti. I have never heard that this was a sex thing. And this is a man who by his own claim, never came. But, you know, this was a sex thing. Yeah. You got that thing? Yeah, absolutely. I think. I think it could hit harder. Yeah. And you know the problem with. Enemas is that gallons of water per minute up your *******? It's not looking like a busted fire hydrant on a summer day in New York. Jesus. The Sanitarium group group, Famous, both due to Kellogg Skillet drawing media attention and due to his actual gifts as a physician. He was actually a good doctor in a lot of ways, including surgery. He was Sojourner truths Dr and he would go on to treat Thomas Edison, Henry Ford, and Amelia Earhart. Before long, the sanitarium was the hip. Place for the rich and famous to go and receive medical care. Here's how one ad from the early 1900s decide described it. It's got this ad has like a picture of the sanitarium, bunch of trees. There's like a Golf Club and a tennis racket on it. Get away and rest. The largest and most elaborately equipped health resort in the world, a Mecca for vacation lists, a cool and delightful summer resting place. Outdoor life encouraged swimming, golf, tennis, volleyball, motoring and tramping. Hmm. Yeah. Tramping systematized diet of simple and delicious foods, expert bath facilities, and the most efficient medical service if desired. Accommodations for 2000 guests. Plan your vacation early. So, yeah, that's that's it's like a spa. It's like a Med spa. It is a Med spa. They're describing the ******** destroyer. And they don't they don't. Put that in the ads. We will ruin your *******. Yeah, absolutely. Slay. Waste to that thing will there will there will not even be a whole when we you don't want I'm on I could I could say a lot of just a lot of metaphors that aren't explicit but you get the picture. You know when Sock. So let's make sure that you know what we're doing over there. Don't get too too wild on that thing. Now, so far, John Harvey sounds, you know, kind of out there. But not evil, right? No evil yet like it's. Definitely not the best health decision to pump down the water in and out of the early, but it's not. He's not. You're not a monster if you think that's, and especially it's the 1880s, eighteen, 90s, it's it's better than a lot of what doctors are doing, you know? Yeah, you're not probably going to die from that like you would from the strict 9 treatments. So yeah, the books or the bugs, not a monster based on what we've heard so far. But as I said, Kellogg was the kind of guy who was always interested in new treatments and expanding the scope of his practices. From the beginning, both the sanitarium and John Harvey Kellogg had been influenced by Graham's teachings. This led him to advocate a vegetarian diet and sobriety, which we've already talked about and is fine even if it's not. A lot of people's choices. But it also convinced Kellogg that ************ was among the greatest human evils. That Amanda quote, now from a wonderful write up in Jezebel. ************ could begin in the most tragic of cases. At a young age, Kellogg reported that he had seen children as young as two years of age placed their hands upon their own genitalia. In these cases, the child, already deficient in morals, was most likely suffering from the sins her parents committed before she was even born. Having excessive sexual relations during pregnancy, or being the offspring spring of a masturbator could warp the values of a fetus in utero. Kellogg did not believe any natural inclination would draw a child's hand to their private parts. These manipulations came from dark and foul sources such as Constipation, hemorrhoids, bladder infections, anal fissures and uncleanliness of the organs. Other foul temptations were to be found in choice of bedding, said Doctor Kellogg. Soft pillows and soft beds and pillows must be carefully avoided. The floor with a single folded blanket beneath the sleeper would be preferable. A hair mattress or a bed of corn husks covered in two or three blankets or a quilted cotton mattress makes a very healthy and comfortable bed. Of course, simply switching out pillows can't stop people from wanting to masturbate. Nothing short of physical torture and mutilation is going to stop at adolescent from experimenting with their own genitals. And as we'll discuss in Part 2, physical torture and mutilation is exactly where Doctor John Harvey Kellogg decided to go. Good. So the next episode is going to be a rough one, miles and everyone listening real bad. Just some of the worst stuff we'll ever talk about on this show. Real, real dark ****. Real black pill hours here. Friends. Oh well, you know, that's. I feel like I'm always here for these ones, but, you know, I'm built different. I'm being talked about, baby. We had you on for the Trump University one. You've had your fun episode, had a lot fun ones, and then we've also had absolutely ****** ones. But, hey, you know what? That's what this show is. You know what I mean? If you want ******* good times, go listen to ******* you know? Whatever the **** that, guys. Yeah, that ****. That's the show where we won't spend an hour on Thursday talking about female genital anyway. Yeah, we'll just talk about **** jokes a lot, probably. And that's great. That's what people enjoyed about this episode, I'm sure. Yeah, no one's gonna be happy with the next episode. I promise you. No one will be happy with the next episode. So don't complain. So don't complain. It's going to be bad. There's your warning, OK? You're ****** ** vegetables and just get a ton of emotional and sexual abuse. It's going to be bad. So listen in on Thursday, alright? Miles, you got any pluggable? Just to have, you know, self-care your mental health for now. Yeah, well, I'll see you on Part 2. Yeah, eat some Graham crackers and pound it. Yeah. Wait. Powerwise anything? OK, eat some gram crackers and masturbate. Yeah, unless that's your thing. Unless it helps you come. And you know, please, if you have any insight into the bug field, I would. I'm honestly, really interested in this. So please, my my my plugable is please approach me with bug doctor information. Bug doctor redfield? What? What the **** was? Yeah? Hello, I'm Erica Kelly from the podcast Southern Fried True crime, and if you want to go from podcast fan to podcast host, do what I did and check out spreaker from iheart. I was working in accounting and hating it. Then after just 18 months of podcasting with Spreaker, I was able to quit my day job. Follow your podcasting dreams. Let's break her handle the hosting, creation, distribution, and monetization of your podcast. Go to spreaker.com. That's spreaker.com. If you could completely remove one phrase from your vocabulary, which phrase would you choose? I don't know. Correct answer. No, I meant I don't know which phrase, and the best way to banish I don't know from your life is by cramming your brain full of stuff you should know. Join your host, Josh and Chuck on the Super Popular podcast packed with fascinating discussions on science, history, pop culture and more episodes that ask, was the lost city of Atlantis Real? I don't know. Is birth order important? I don't know. How does pizza work? Well, I do know. Bit about that see? You can know even more, because stuff you should know has over 1500 immensely interesting episodes for your brain to feast on. So what do you say? I don't want to miss the stuff you should know. Podcast you're learning already. Listen to stuff you should know on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. I'm Doctor Laurie Santos, host of the Happiness Lab podcast, the show that presents the latest science based strategies. To help us live happier, more joyful lives. 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