Kellogg was an American surgeon who ran the world-famous Battle Creek Sanitarium in his hometown in Michigan for more than 50 years. There he promoted his vision of healthy living, which included vegetarianism, physical exercise, an avoidance of alcohol and tobacco, and daily water and yogurt enemas.
With his brother W.K. Kellogg, he invented the corn flake, but the two had a falling out over the addition of sugar to the recipe and W.K. founded what became the Kellogg Company. The two never reconciled.
John Harvey Kellogg also preached racial segregation and eugenics, and enforced the suppression of sexual activity by pouring acid on the clitorises of girls and women and by performing circumcisions without anesthesia on boys and men. Kellogg boasted that he had never had sex with his wife during their 40 year marriage.
References:
- Wikipedia biography
- New York Times obituary
- Kellogg’s “Simple Life in a Nutshell”
- biography in the Museum of Quackery
- Biography on NNDB
- Seventh-Day Adventist film history of Kellogg
- American Journal of Public Health article “John Harvey Kellogg, MD: Health Reformer and Antismoking Crusader”
- Snap, Crackle and Profit — the story behind a cereal empire By Patricia Zacharias of The Detroit News
- full text of Kellogg’s 1890 book “Plain Facts for Old and Young Embracing the Natural History and Hygiene of Organic Life”
- Kellogg and soy foods
- “The Road to Wellville,” a 1994 novel by T. C. Boyle
- “The Road to Wellville,” a 1994 movie
