Good Health and How We Won It, With an Account of the New Hygiene

by Upton Sinclair; Michael Williams

For, while the people at Battle Creek realize that the record of the institution for more than forty years in curing sick people is one to which they may point with pride, yet in their view this good work is but a trivial thing in comparison with their principal object, which is the conversion of those who come to them to be cured, into home teachers and missionaries of the truths of right living. It is wonderful to observe to what a great extent success has already rewarded their efforts, to see the signs which indicate the growth of public interest in their work.

Dr. Kellogg took charge of the institution which is now known as The Battle Creek Sanitarium thirty-two years ago. The institution at that time was a small two-story building, known as a water-cure or health institute, with three or four cottages and twelve patients. With the changing of the name and management, and the application of scientific methods, a new era of prosperity began, and the work has steadily progressed ever since.

The Battle Creek Sanitarium was the first attempt to assemble in one place all rational means of treating disease in combination with the regulation of diet and habits of life, and giving special emphasis to physiologic or natural methods of cure. The institution has for many years been recognized as the leading establishment of the sort in the world.

From the beginning, the Sanitarium has been non-sectarian in character. Although a deeply religious spirit pervades the place, the institution is not and never has been under the control of any denomination. For many years it was closely affiliated with the Seventh-day Adventist denomination, because of the preponderance of persons belonging to this denomination among its managers and employees. For years, however, this affiliation has ceased to exist.

The institution is non-dividend paying. That is, it is a strictly altruistic or philanthropic enterprise. The charter which it received from the State requires that its earnings shall be devoted to the development of the enterprise and the maintenance of its charities. Dr. Kellogg receives no compensation for his labors in connection with the institution, and the thirty or forty physicians and business managers who are associated with him in his work likewise accept very meager compensation for their labors. Dr. Kellogg has for many years received a liberal income from the sale of his books, foods, and from his various inventions, but the income from these sources, as well as from the institution itself, has been devoted to the carrying forward of the humanitarian work to which he has devoted his life. The Haskell Home for Orphans, The Bethesda Rescue Home, the Life Boat Mission in Chicago, The American Medical Missionary College, and other charitable and philanthropic enterprises are allied enterprises which have grown out of the work which began at the Battle Creek Sanitarium.

The institution has never been endowed, and therefore, if the work was to grow, it was necessary to make money. The authors of this book have seen and read the legal documents by which Dr. Kellogg turned over to the American Missionary Association nearly everything of which he was possessed. The value of his work as a surgeon, estimated at prevailing rates for such work, would be at least fifty to sixty thousand dollars yearly. He touches not a cent of this money, nor does he touch his salary as superintendent—which he himself placed at the figure of twelve hundred dollars. There are many other physicians connected with the institution who, as specialists in New York or Chicago, would be in receipt of large incomes, but they are as content as is Dr. Kellogg to accept a bare pittance, finding their joy in the work they are doing.[3]

[3] The reader must be warned that there are many charlatans and shrewd business men who have taken advantage of the work of Dr. Kellogg and of the prestige of the name “Battle Creek.”

The energy displayed by the faculty and staff of the University of Health in carrying on their work is nothing less than astonishing. During one week when the writers were at the Sanitarium, there were more than a thousand patients all told, including the non-paying ones. There are many days when Dr. Kellogg operates from early in the morning until late at night, having very many highly difficult and dangerous operations to perform, for he is well known as a surgeon. After such a long day in the operating room, without a break for food or rest, he will give one of his lectures to the patients, or go the rounds of the wards, winding up the day by attending to a mass of business or writing or studying in his laboratories. He works continually, day in and day out, for eighteen hours a day; and this he has done for the past thirty-five years or so. He wrote one bulky book containing much technical and scientific matter in ten days, using three or four stenographers, and working in stretches of twenty hours at a time. He has never taken a holiday. All of his many journeys abroad or in this country are on matters connected with his mission in life; and while on his journeys he is continually writing or studying, and carrying on the direction of his multitudinous affairs by letter or telegraph. Yet to-day, at the age of fifty-five, he shows no signs of diminution of energy; no signs of nervous breakdown, or of the ailments which bring thousands of business men and women to him for treatment.

He himself thinks that there is nothing very remarkable in all this. He attributes it to his abstention from meat, from tea and coffee, alcohol and tobacco. He never eats more than one “hearty” meal a day; his second meal, when he takes one, consisting of a little fruit. His sole regret is that during the first fourteen or fifteen years of his life he ate meat. He believes that any child, if it begin right, can, when it grows up, do all that he is doing.

“I was,” he said to a friend, “a puny, undersized, ailing child; born when my father was more than fifty. It was the accepted opinion that I would not live to be a man which I fully believed. I had an appetite for knowledge and resolved that since I was to die early I must study and work very hard in order to accomplish a little something before I died. So I would study until one to three o’clock in the morning; then rise at six. From the age of ten I have fully supported myself. All this deliberate stealing of time from sleep resulted in a permanent stunting of my growth. And as I went on in life, I kept up the same habits of night work. And yet, I have only once been troubled by an illness; which came upon me a few years ago as a result of overwork. But which I got rid of; and now I am in better bodily condition than I was twenty-five years ago. But I was not handicapped by a great number of things that are bars to other workers, over which they stumble. I have slept when I could in the open air; I have drawn from air, water, light, heat, and proper exercise, the benefits that inhere in them; and I have nourished my body on wholesome foods. I mention these points with insistence—these points that seem so freakish to many people—simply because to me they are fundamental points in the physiologic, or natural, way of healing and of living.”