Part One: Kellogg: The Great American Cum Doctor

Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:02):
What I don't know, uh, sexually abusing my children through
breakfast cereals. Yeah yeah, I'm Robert Evans. This is behind
the Bastards and we're talking this this, this is an
episode that's got to go in some bad places, dark places. Miles,
how are you? I'm so sorry, Miat Miles here. How

(00:31):
do you feel about cereal? Um, the like grain breakfast thing? Yeah? Yeah, yeah,
the concept of the thing that you can like pour
into a bowl at milk Yeah, right right? Love you know,
love it. Loved it as a child. Don't don't have time,
don't have time for it. Now it's 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

(00:52):
a box of cereal and then this ship is like
stale because I didn't eat it, like within however long,
I never want more than about a bowl. 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 treat cereal, and I'll eat like a half a
mixing bowl worth, and then I'll be so just disgusted
because I used half and half as the milk that

(01:13):
I put the cereal in the back st and then
I'm like non and it it calls to me. Yeah,
I mean, I'm this. 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 twenty five hour grocery stores at one
thirty in the morning, and I would buy the largest
thing of marshmallow cereal and I would sit with a

(01:34):
giant bole and a bong watching Star Trek the Next
Generation and the eating and it was and it ruled
some great memories of those days. Um, how do you
feel about granola? Um? I My first thought is just
a slang, you know, pejorative for hippies, you know, granola,

(01:55):
But the food I like it. Talking. Are we talking
like like bar are we talking? I mean, any any
granola based product? Do you do a lot with granola?
I think we can all agree, versatile Nature, Valley, Fanny yogurt.
Yeah yeah, but really, thing, I'm sorry that my I'm

(02:17):
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 fucked up, and you started, that's a serial
talking about Robert. Serial serial killers, not serial killers. Worse
than a serial killer. Though. The fun thing about today's episode, Miles,

(02:37):
is that the bastard we're talking about has either helped
to invent or popularize a variety of products that I'm
going to guess about a hundred percent 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. Uh. Now, the guy we're
talking about was also a hugely prominent eugenicist and a

(03:00):
prolific advocate of female genital mutilation. Um so yeah, we
are this is gonna be like the elevators. Yeah, we
are talking about John Harvey Kellogg. I feel like, I mean,

(03:21):
because I know vaguely, like it's all very fucking people.
Most people have heard little bits of this. It's like
he's like, Yo, here's some sex shit and he made
corn flakes to stop kids from fucking. 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 it's much deeper

(03:42):
and much worse than that. Okay, uh 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 uh mind that kind of led to
the birth of John Harvey Kellogg as the person that
he became. Um, do you know much about Seventh Day Adventismuh? Yeah,

(04:05):
I know a little bit about s d A. Yeah, yeah,
I mean, but not much like I just know about like, uh,
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 Seventh Day part and they you know, they
believe the apocalypse is imminent, and they kind of have
for a long time. Yeah, okay, right, right right. That's

(04:26):
which today is like half of the religious right. But
back in 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 mainstream belief necessarily,
but it's like a trend through Seventh Day Adventist thought.
And we're gonna talk about why for a little bit. So,
the Seventh day Adventists are are a miller Wite sect,

(04:48):
and the miller Wites were a religious movement that started
in eighteen sixteen. Whenever Vermont farmer named William Miller converted
from being kind of like a skeptical deist, like a
lot like like Ben Franklin, right, Like, that's the guy
he got. He got killed hard on the Baptist faith
and um because he was this kind of rational skeptic guy.

(05:08):
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. Um.
So he 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,

(05:29):
he'd gone full conspiracy corkboard Pepe Sylvia 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 date if you is he like one of
the first who's like one of the first sort of

(05:50):
conspiratorial numerologists. Like, I don't know if he's one of
the freaking new ground to be like there's code in here. Yeah,
there's hidden numbers in the Bible that predict the end time.
He's like, I think pretty much the first guy who
does good for him. Yeah, I know, right, goods sold
in a weird way. If I was at Sea Pack,
I think I would drop that if that was like

(06:12):
I was, 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 to check Wikipedia. Dude, don't tell me about secret
Bible codes. My family in vinced secret Bible codes. Oh
my god, Hey Bill, this guys trying to tell me
about biblical fucking numerology. Me. I imagine the Miller's moved

(06:39):
from Vermont to New York at some point they're just like, yeah,
then they're in the elevator's union. Yeah. So, unlike everyone
at Sea Pack, 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

(07:00):
his discovery with people because he didn't want to like
create a panic. He decided the world was going to
end in eighteen forty three, 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 keeps quiet for a while, but decides, like
God wants me to tell people the end is coming
so they can have their souls saved. So in eighteen

(07:21):
thirty one 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 when the in date came would be incinerated

(07:42):
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
eighteen forty years so he had a newspaper called The
Signs of the Times, which he used to spread his
beliefs and mass to audiences whould never have been able
to hear him speak. His actual number of followers was
probably in the low tens of thousands, but Miller's ideas

(08:04):
were influential and widely discussed in the popular culture of
the day. The mainstream press wrote about his theories regularly.
As eighteen forty three drew nie, people started to ask, Hey,
what win exactly in eighteen forty three should we expect
all life on earth to end? The fireball? Now? Miller's
answer was precise, but not super accurate. Um he said

(08:26):
that it would occur in the Jewish year eighteen forty three,
which was apparently between March one, eighteen forty three and
March eighteen forty four. I don't know enough about Judaism
to tell you if that is the actual Jewish year
of eighteen thirty three. Uh So that's what he said, Yeah,
it's it's it's way far ahead. It seems wrong to me,

(08:49):
but I that's what he was telling people at least. Ye, yeah,
because I think right now it's in the Hebrew years
fifty seven eighty one. Yeah. See, I I think he was.
I don't think he knew my about Judius Sam. He
got away with that ship, but no one did. No
one in America did back then. You know. I love that,
you know, because like that would be I think, what

(09:09):
fifties six so three? Yeah, no, no, no, it's the Jewish,
Like what the just March? Yeah, like he's up, bro,
that's wild. Oh you know Jewish people, they love March,
big month. Yeah, okay, 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,

(09:32):
this is ship but okay maybe this was. Yeah. So,
um spoilers here, Miles, in case you haven't gotten to
the end of your eighteen forty three history book. But
the world did not end that year. Um, not that
I'm aware of, um signs point to know. Um. So yeah.
The fact that all life didn't end in in in

(09:54):
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

(10:15):
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 eighteen forty four, which
he said was the Jewish day of Atonement. And again,
I don't know if it was, um, but that's what
he said. Uh. Many Adventists clung to this in order
to have hope that they'd been right all along. When

(10:36):
October twenty two passed without everyone and everything dying, they
were heartbroken. And he's a tough time for them. Um. Now,
the miller Wites 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 when he was preaching. Because when two end times
dates passed without the times ending, he was consumed by

(10:58):
shame and he spent the rest of his life hiding
from the world. That's good. Oh man, that that's dope.
That's that's dope. That's great. That's what you're supposed to do.
That's what scumbags of honor used to do. I mean,
the jig was up and off. You thought the world

(11:19):
was ending. You were wrong. You spent the rest of
your life hiding in your basement. Yeah. And to his followers,
which had sort of one of the things people call
them was Adventists. To the Adventists, this failed apocalypse prediction
became known as the Great Disappointment. So they're real bummed
out about this. But while William Miller had the good

(11:41):
graces to hide his face from the world when he
was proven wrong, the movement he had 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 unequinical 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 eighteen forty eight,
Ellen White and her husband some Guy, attended a conference

(12:05):
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. In the main topic of debate for the
conference that year was whether or not Miller's prophecies had
even been real. Right. Obviously, the date had been wrong,
but like, was he completely full of ship or did
he just like mess up some numbers a couple of times?

(12:26):
Um so, yeah. One chunk of the Adventists argued that
Miller had been right and that Christ had come back
on October forty four, but that he had done so
in spiritual form and he hadn't destroyed the world. Um
so he was right about the date, but Jesus did
it invisibly said nobody noticed? Fuck yes, And that's a

(12:48):
good ship. That's some twe logic, Like, that's the logic
that dictates all life in America today. That cutting edge, amazing,
and people took that ship. That's when it's a rap.
That's some Joe Biden and Trump switched faces and Trump
is still the president likely, Oh my god, unbelievable invisibly. Yeah,

(13:13):
that makes ye like like if I had been at
that meeting, I would have just stood up and started
clapping like you you did it. You invented America. You
motherfuck are you beautiful? Bats? Oh? I was there, I
was there. Shirts fucking logic failed forever. This is the

(13:34):
breaking of the world. Yeah, so good, So another Oh
my God, and again, and then it's continued by people
who are unwilling to admit they're wrong. So not it
becomes a religion because this group ego is unrelenting. It's
so good. But now it was like, but how do

(13:55):
they live so long? I want that eventually this will
terminate in somebody firing new clear warheads into the sky
because invisible aliens are molesting our children or something, and
that will be the end of all life on earth.
And it's going to be very funny in the last
like four and a half seconds. Um. So, there was
another sect at the meeting, led by a guy named
Hiram Edson, and they taught that the date Miller had

(14:18):
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 eighteen forty three in order to prepare his
way to his return to Earth. Um. 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

(14:40):
life in in in hell fire. Um. 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, omni because it seems that way.

(15:01):
So if you are omniscient, you're all knowing, all powerful
and fucking everywhere and nowhere and all of that ship
at once. You're like, hey, motherfucker, hold up, man, I
gotta clean some ship up. It's gonna fucking a little bit. Man,
there's some problems if you only fucking new. I'm serious,
if you only fucking new, I won't even tell y'all,

(15:23):
but I'll be there in a second. I'd be like, dude,
I think Christ has a drug problem or something like
what the fun is going on? It's always what is
he doing? Is he like? Is he just doing a
bunch of k every night? And waking up six hours later.
Things does he does? He walk around with a spray
bottle in a flash leg trying to find always shooting

(15:45):
up his nose. I think we've both known about four Jesus. Yeah,
I'm familiar with Christ. Here with Christ. Oh God. So
so this meeting goes on, and as I said, Ellen
White is there this lady Ellen White who as a

(16:07):
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

(16:29):
is correct. So basically here him 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 Wrights were
used to their profits being wrong, and it didn't hurt

(16:50):
her credibility in any way. By eighteen fifty, 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. Um. 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

(17:14):
just you're like, you know what, let's not do that.
Still that for a second. I can be wrong about this,
I can't be wrong about other things. Yeah, I like that.
You know what? God just yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah? What
how you didn't see it? That should just fucking happened.
Just happened. How fucking dare you even? Like, what were

(17:35):
you about to say? Because I'm telling you that's what
God just said? Okay, asshole? So and 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. Proselyzation became
an increasingly huge deal from this point forward. One of

(17:57):
the hotspots from miller Wite recruitment is Michigan, and that's
where in eighteen fifty two 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 first place was like
they believed also, it's a weird religious ship that like

(18:19):
wasn't quite cool over in Europe, so they came here
to do their weird religious ship. And then when people
had weird religious ideas in the new United States, that
kind of moved to Michigan to do it because it
was off the beaten past, like makes a lot of
my relatives make a lot more sense. 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

(18:40):
let's move Inland a little bit. Yeah, you know what,
maybe we should go over here for a little bit.
I don't 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 gets busy. In

(19:02):
eighteen fifty two, an Adventist named Merritt Cornell converted a
Fellon named John Preston Kellogg, who was the subject of
today's episode. The Kellogg family had moved to Michigan in
the early eighteen forties, 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

(19:25):
series of religious conversions because there's all these weird, little
different niche faiths in Michigan. Uh And in eighteen fifty two,
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
eighteen fifty two, his family came to include a little
baby named John Harvey Kellogg. Now, John Harvey's earliest memories

(19:48):
would have heavily involved the Adventist faith. In eighteen fifty five,
his father pledged three hundred dollars, which is a lot
of money in those days, to help start up the
first Adventist printing press in Michigan, because again, putting out magazine,
beans 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.

(20:10):
The press was established in Battle Creek, Michigan, 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 sixteen children.
Uh family finances were stretched in their very crowded household.

(20:32):
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, you know
sad and yeah, well it kind of sounds like a

(20:53):
bummer thing to be raised around as a kid, like
is there any fun if like you're just being like
fun when 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 shitty banksy.
Yeah yeah, ship Banksy. So uh. And he was also
pretty sick. John Harvey Kellogg was from most of his childhood.

(21:15):
He had a bad diet, His family eight really unhealthily,
and he suffered from rickets for years. He grew up
small and thin. Uh. He would top out at just
five ft four, So he was he's not a healthy
little kid. Uh. And I'm gonna quote now from a
book titled John Harvey Kellogg and the Religion of Biologic
Living by Brian Wilson. Dr Brian Wilson quote. He would
compensate for his physical shortcomings by energy, assertiveness, and a

(21:38):
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 you need books. Yeah, oh no,

(21:58):
that's so fun. It's it's really you know what I
mean to have such a fucking 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 needs some
nutrients and like, yeah, you can read food, some reading. Um,

(22:22):
it does it does get better because when he's twelve,
a local pastor who may may have been James White, uh,
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 read. Um. So Kellogg like as soon

(22:43):
as he's allowed to go to school, he basically spinds
an entire winter. It's like stuck in the neighborhoods schoolhouse. Um,
he's a he's an auto diet act. He's very good
at learning, and he catches up very quickly. He just
reads constantly he's clearly a very smart boy. Um quote. Yeah.
So he compensated for his physical difficulties with kind of
a relentless sense of self confidence as well. He was

(23:03):
loud and assertive from a young age. One minister who
knew him at the time described him as a bright, sturdy, active,
wide awake boy. In eighteen sixty three, when he was
twelve 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

(23:24):
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

(23:46):
a chuckle, for, in addition to his childhood discussed at
the sight of blood. He had been at at the
age eleven, nothing more than an undersized boy working in
his father's Battle Creek broom factory, distinguished only by his
exceptional manual dexterity sorting broomcorn, and the fact that his
family belonged to his struggling apocalyptic sect significantly. Dr Kellogg
followed this memory with that of another. Shortly after his

(24:07):
mother asked him about his future in 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 of 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 and he doesn't want to be a

(24:28):
doctor because he sees what doctors are doing in the
eighteen sixties 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.

(24:51):
Uhon's only motto is we do not serve God. Um,
it's time for some ads. It is time for an
added two, maybe three, maybe four. We're back, so uh yeah.
From that moment forward, his mom dedicates him to human service,

(25:14):
and Kellogg would later recall that basically, from that point forward,
he never had any desire but to serve the Lord
in 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

(25:35):
of the Prophetess Ellen White. He was promoted rapidly, and
it kind of seems like they decided, this kid is
so smart, he's got to do something for the faith.
We're going to like groom him for leadership within within
our weird little apocalyptic colt um. He was promoted rapidly,
and by the time he was sixteen, he had been
made an editor of the Adventist newspaper. John Harvey loved religion,

(25:56):
and he particularly loved what most people would call the
boring niche de tails of theological debate. His love of
this brought him into direct contact with Ellen White, who
took a liking to him. Her husband eventually confided 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. Uh, yes, it's

(26:21):
a lot of pressure, a lot of pressure for the Lord.
They're they're really putting a lot on this kid's shoulders.
And from age seventeen to twenty, John Harvey Kellogg continued
his work on The Adventist Review and Harold. He also
started teaching grammar school before he had actually finished high
school himself, which is I guess the thing you could
do back in those days. Uh, he was kids, Yeah,

(26:43):
while you're still in high school. Yeah, I'm about to
wrap that degree up. But here's the deal. Kids learn
letters here. Um. 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 received a waking vision from God
that this was to be his calling. But when Johnny

(27:04):
was twenty, Ellen Whitehead herself yet another vision. This one
was that John Harvey Kellogg was going to become a physician.
So he 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 prophetess with
a brain injury sees God tell her this kid is
going to be a doctor, the thing he least wants

(27:26):
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, Yeah, how
when when you say doctor you imagine like a guy
who treats illnesses with a variety of medicines. Right, There's

(27:47):
no fucking way that there you have any other definition
that isn't a doctor dre or Dr Pepper. Joke of
what a fucking doctor is her Her definition of doctor
was a guy who gives people different kinds of baths. Yeah.
To explain why, Miles wants to talk about what we

(28:08):
have to talk about. An intellectual movement in America in
the mid eighteen hundreds called sectarian medicine. So medicine in
the early eighteen hundreds was mostly nonsense and poison, right.
We talked about this a lot on the show. UM,
But it's important to know that a lot of regular
people recognize that doctors were bad at their jobs, like
the fact that they were eighteen thirties medical treatments were

(28:31):
basically just bleeding people and feeding the mercury, and this
was bad and a lot of people at the time
we're like, kind of seems like the doctors don't do
anything to kill people, and then like something was wrong
with your like a cough and they saw your foot off.
It doesn't seem like they're good at this. Um. Yeah,
So it's it's like in a big like purgatives are

(28:54):
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 ship instantly. He
died of vomiting and shifting. H Well, the thing is
supposed to do the opposite thing. Will dial it back
next time. Alright, so you got the same thing, all right,
here we go, here we go, do a little less
this time, or a little more. Maybe we didn't give

(29:14):
him enough. Uh 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

(29:35):
the disease, right, which you can see is is both
wrong 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, but
it's a poison that kills the worst poison, you know,
So there is medicine that work. Like you can see
the doctors at the time they were entirely on the

(29:57):
wrong thinking track. They were just like, but you don't
get people mercury because they have a cough. No, I
wonder what the funk were they seeing where they're like, oh, yeah,
that ship works, dude, you hit him with some more.
And they had stuff that did work too. Yeah. Yeah,
I mean it's it's hard to sime, like you gotta
look at a data set at some point and be like, man,

(30:19):
my bad average, isn't I don't think there were not
a lot of data sets at the tip, No, but
I mean in this in their own like even just
thinking back, like they'll look back and you're like, I
have lost a lot of people, and I can actually
kind of remember only a couple of times I helped
to save 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 fucking butcher slash like star

(30:43):
of a West Craven film. Like you're limorting on opium
all the time, and you're letting the neighborhood kids watch
you cut their friends leg off through a window. It's
all a weird scene. Yeah, it's it's not great. So um, yeah,
this is heroic medicine, the sawing people's legs and poisoning

(31:03):
them things. I'm a hero. Jesus Christ and a lot
of people thought this was bullshit, and throughout the mid
eighteen hundreds, 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. Um.

(31:23):
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 which hazel does
some ship like Thailand all comes from a plant that
you can you can make a tea that'll do the
same thing. Time. There's all sorts of natural remedies comfrey

(31:44):
and yarrow and plantain that really do have beneficial effects,
which is why like native American medicine worked a lot
better than many kinds of western medicine. And yeah, your
friends leg off, yeah, um, 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, the

(32:09):
sectarian doctors, believed that keeping people healthy was about restoring
natural balance. Um. 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, okay um. But sectarian doctors also believed
a lot of nonsense themselves because people didn't know anything

(32:31):
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

(32:54):
god a good episode, it's it gets so bad. So
remember when I said sectarian doctors focused on natural medicine
and bringing the body back into balance. Well, one thing
a lot of them believed was that the body got
taken out of balance when you masturbated, because obviously you're ejaculating, right,

(33:19):
You're you're losing a fluid which must be taking your
body out of balance and making you sick. Right, I
think that's where the logic line started and keep it
you gotta keep it in no fat This is actually
a very no fap episode. It is the same logic
that proud boys, but like that, like you will be
at a certain point, or that you'll you'll go crazy

(33:41):
and kill yourself if you come. But if you don't, though,
like aren't you then hadn't thought of that part? Well,
actually some of them did believe that the reason people
in the Bible lived to be eight hundred years old,
perfect balance and never came. Yeah, so yes, actually, Miles,
that's exactly right, the virgin logic logic. I'm actually forever.

(34:04):
I mean, John Harvey Kellogg spoilers is an in cell.
So we're going I'm gonna quote from a write up
in the Journal of Technology and Culture about the the
the evolution of sectarian physicians beliefs about masturbation. Quote. The
source of these beliefs can be traced back to an
eighteenth century Swiss physician S. A. D. Too So. Too

(34:25):
So 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 masturbation. Those
who masturbated would soon have a cloudiness of ideas, suffer
a decay of their bodily power. Experience acute pains in
their head, be afflicted with pimples on their face, and
eventually lose the power of generation. Females were likely to

(34:49):
be subject to hysterical fits, violent cramps, ulceration of the matrix.
I don't know what the matrix meant in this situation.
I'm guessing that's like the uterates. But yeah, that's what
a fucking term. Oh my god, the matrix. Yeah, it's
also the opposite of correct, just in terms of what
masturbation can do for cramps. But yeah. So. Tisso's ideas

(35:12):
reached America at the end of the eighteenth 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.

(35:35):
Dim Mutation of energy led to direct debility, while increase
led to indirectability. 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 gonna get sick. Rush concluded, based on observation that
sex was a major cause of nervous excitement and was
thus extremely dangerous. Basically, people seem to get excited when

(35:57):
they're fucking. That can't be good on No, none of that,
none of that. You can't have that. The matrix is
at stake. The matrix could go out of whack. Uh.
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 yes, I was hoping I was a part of

(36:19):
the uterus. I was hoping that it was something to
a damnit. I mean, the movie The Matrix does kind
of take place in like a robot uterus filled with people, okay,
that are also batteries that are also batteries, like like
babies in a uterus. Yes, so okay, I understand by
two doctors just talking to each other right now, very yeah,

(36:43):
so Russia 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

(37:03):
come doctors, all with their own theories on why masturbation
was bad and how to stop it. Edward bliss Foot,
which is an amazing name, believed that masturbation disrupted the
natural animal magnetism between the sexes. Sylvester Graham believed that
over stimulation of the nervous system was the cause of
all disease, and since Graham believed this was the case,

(37:23):
the ultimate preventative medication was to live a life that
was as boring as possible. This meant no masturbation because
that excites you. It meant the absolute minimum amount of
sex necessary to procreate, and it also meant eating and
drinking only the very blandest things. Graham band grease, salt, condiment, spices, tea, coffee, tobacco,

(37:44):
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 flavorless, 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. Yeah, yeah,
my kid was jerking off. Can I guess some of

(38:05):
those ship crackers that will help make a boob? Also, wait,
are the blandless 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,

(38:26):
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. Yeah, and and like the logic of like
and like. And also, eat these crackers, Man, eat these crackers.

(38:47):
They'll make you ship and they taste bad and they're
honestly what you won't suck if you eat these, I
won't funk if I have diarrhea. 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 masterbating enough. One of the things he's
right about is like the diet at this point involved
a lot of like pork and Greece and like people's

(39:08):
bowels were often in bad shape, and he was like,
having enough fiber is good for your health. Also, never fuck, Yeah,
that's like I was with you. I don't know, never
fuck and no salt or flavor. Yeah, even Catholic priests
don't do that. I mean they also fun if I
there's something, there's some kind of something, yeah, something, But

(39:31):
not for the followers of Sylvester Graham. Now, doctors like Graham,
we're 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

(39:55):
medically correct, you know. Yeah. Yeah, it's that to sucked
when like microscopes and ship was just like dunking on
all this ship. Yeah, it really was a bummer for
these guys, Like, I mean, 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 that's another episode so um. Yeah.

(40:23):
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 performers, on
the other hand, believe that whereas moral sins led to
spiritual diseases, it was physiological sins that led to diseases

(40:43):
of the body. And just as spiritual disease could be
avoided by following the Ten 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 Dr Larkin B. Coles, it is as
truly a sin against Heaven to violate a law of
life as to break one of the Tin commandments. So

(41:06):
if you masturbate, if you eat salt, you are sitting
against God as much as if you murdered, because you're
violating the natural order of your body. Right, it's a
moral it's a physiological sin. They invented a whole new
type of sinning. Yeah, it's called oh my God, it's
called being satisfied. Yeah, it's it's called enjoying even a

(41:28):
second of your miserable, dirt farming life. Yes, yeah, that's it.
That's that's a secret man's 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

(41:51):
to people, are you fucking what is wrong with you? People?
The only reason to live is to eat salt and
fucking serious all the time. You'll get this guy out
of a fucking I'm gonna kill this guy. What then
did he just say to me? They're a doctor. You're
a doctor. My last doctor prescribed me a bunch of

(42:14):
fucking Yeah, this is the Roman Empire. My doctor just
prescribed me. Come, I'll have you know, and I'm living.
Sir Graham is Um 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

(42:36):
young man. It was very popular among religious hardliners like
the Adventists. 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 was Price Kntz, believed

(42:56):
that freshwater cured all ailments. You could take it internal
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
eighteen forties and was still a big deal in the
eighteen fifties when James and Ellen White moved their razes

(43:16):
to Battle Creek, Michigan. And this is the point where
all of the Seventh 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,

(43:37):
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 at avoiding doctors in medicine came
to be seen as an act of faith. In fact,

(43:59):
in eighteen forty nine, 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 what's what's the God of Israel's batting average? Yeah?

(44:22):
How's how's Israel doing in the How is that one
doing against foot chopper? I think foot choppers got the edge.
Foot choppers got the edge? O the God really okay? Well?
For a time, adventists believed that Ellen White could bring
the Lord's healing upon people just by praying for them.

(44:43):
This period came to an end in the mid eighteen
fifties when one of her followers in Camden, New York,
died after refusing medical treatment in favor of prayer. Ellen
White called the reports that her preaching helped kill this
woman groundless, but from that point forward, she started telling
her followers that faith healing should be balanced with actual
medical air. So she backed the funk pedals once she
gets someone killed, which again, these grifters are so much

(45:06):
more moral people than than our modern ones. Even maybe
not fair to call her a grifter. I do think
she believed, but like clearly felt bad that she got
someone killed, like ship I got I. Oh boy, you
know man, that was kind of a big swing. That
was an l for me. Yeah, all right, chalk that
one on there. Yeah, you can write it down. So

(45:27):
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 um. And this is like kind of ties into
the fact that Adventists accepted the apocalypse was not as
imminent as they'd initially believed, so they had to take

(45:48):
care of their bodies as part of their being right
with God. Um. 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 lash is on
all of this grammist stuff about you gotta be a vegetarian,
you can't eat salt, you can't eat anything good, you know. Um,
So they all start to adopt those beliefs as well.

(46:11):
So this is what they kind of figured it out though,
that because isn't that because the blue isn't the blue
zone diet actually known for like longer life expectator And
that's what I mean. So is the Mediterranean um right, right? Right?
Or not to say that he was, you know, omniscient
and knowing that but like yeah not or to just look,
I'm all spice and salt, baby, but one of the

(46:31):
most healthy things they figure out because like pork is
a horrible meat for your health, terrible for you, Like
we all love the way it tastes, but we shouldn't
be eating it. It's bad 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 because it's
easy to make a lot of it. Right, Beef's not

(46:51):
great for you either, Like Mediterraneans eat a lot of meat,
but it's not primarily beef and pork and stuff. You know. Yeah, exactly,
the healthiest diets aren't necessarily vegetarian. But they're definitely not
eating nothing but bacon exactly. Um So, yeah, like the

(47:14):
American diet at this point is really bad, and it's true,
but like they start to notice, like part of why
they get so into these medical beliefs is like they
adopt these grandmist health beliefs and they all feel better
because they're eating healthy, like it is better for you.
He might be onto 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.

(47:36):
So this is why I keep going back to all
of these different strades of thought, because this is how
John Harvey Kellogg grows up. This is what he grows
up believing. Um, and he didn't, you know, because in
his early childhood, and they haven't quite adopted these grandmast
beliefs yet. Sickness is a constant factor in his childhood
his father, and it's also not Trusting doctors is a
big factor. So his father has like lifelong chronic near

(47:59):
fatalarrhea 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 insured him. So like
when hold you know, say that whole sequence of words
out loud again, that's so crazy. He chronic debilitating diarrhea

(48:23):
that he got from an eye infection when the doctor
prescribed an insect bite for an eye infection, bite for
your eye infection, doc, I gotta, I gotta, I gotta
tell you, man, this is I believe I trusted you.
My eye is a fucking worse and my diary is

(48:47):
off the fucking meat hook right now. I can't you
know medicine? What the fuck where did you get that bug?
There's a lot of unanswered questions here, um So obviously, Also,
his dad's first wife dies of tuberculosis, His first daughter
died of a lung infection which the doctor blamed on worms,

(49:10):
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. It's full God, No,
no worms, no worms. The doctor was wrong. Yes, it
was tuberculosis. He was giving her like poison because he

(49:30):
thought her lungs were filled with worms, and then he
poisoned her to death like a wild guess uh warm
worms were there? Bug focused? Doctor? Where yet? Yeah? You
know who won't murder your child with strict nine because

(49:52):
he thinks their lungs are full of worms? Who raytheon?
Don't murder your child with an honest to God knife missile.
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. Um. He buys

(50:15):
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 than, for example,
bug bites honestly, where the fuck is that? It's all

(50:43):
who's the godfather of bug? Doctory? And where the fuck
who's the who's the bug supplier? I don't know, 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. Dr Bug. I think you

(51:04):
may not think you may not be the best position.
It sounds like you got a scorpion in your brain.
What scorpion talking? Get Okay, I'm getting the funk out
of here. So here's how John Harvey recalled, Like, imagine
if you actually had something wrong with your asshole, we

(51:26):
gotta put a milk beat up there. Put all the
bugs I can in your ass. Oh yeah, I've seen this.
Not enough bugs, not enough bugs, not enough rachnids in there.
Oh my god, you swear you swear he solved your thing. Yes,
my sister had a baby after she saw him. She

(51:50):
was scared not to also, you know, I think maybe
they were just having an affair. Yeah, that made it
seem like a miracle because her husband went to go
see him when he had trouble urinating and the doctor
suggested a bug bite on his ball sack. So here's

(52:11):
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 ten, I was wrapped in a cold, wet sheet
pack to bring out the eruption and an attack of measles.
I shall never forget the crude shower bath with which
it's health barrel tank arranged over a pan with perforated bottom,
through which cold water from a deep well poured in

(52:33):
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 I could not escape, and
no one came to my relief until the tank was empty.
So they waterboarded this little kid. Is like medicine. That
was their treatment was like We're gonna lock you in
a tank and poured freezing water on you for hours.
What the fuck? Hyde, Okay, thanks hydropathy excited dropathy. So

(53:01):
he's being he's being like al Qaeda tortured, like c
i A style tortured. But it's like you got measles. Hi,
I'm Gina Haspel, Director of High You know what, I
will say this at Guantanamo. No fucking measles, not one case,
one case. You're welcome. You tell me, you tell me.

(53:23):
Jim from the Office was right, we should be thankful
for the CIA. Thank you, and that's some good news
from John Krazinski. So right around the same time and
John Harvey's early adolescence, his family expanded their medical interests
into Grahamism. Now before becoming Grammasts, his father, his family

(53:46):
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 sectary in medicine. Ellen White had a vision in

(54:08):
the early eighteen sixties. She had already been advising her
followers to avoid alcohol, tobacco, caffeine, and fatty foods, but
now she had 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 Kelloggs and other people in Battle Creek. It's kind

(54:30):
of hard to tell, like exactly where this this, like
which way this flowed? It was probably both ways, um,
and there may 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

(54:51):
school that the church runs to teach doctor's hydropathy, and
they call this the Western Health Reform. Uh kind of,
so it officially opened it's still unfinished doors on September
eighteen sixty six. Since this was her biggest new project,

(55:12):
she told her new brightest follower, John Harvey Kellogg, that
he needed to go there. So she'd had a vision
that he was meant to be a physician, not a teacher.
John Harvet, like I said that a little earlier too.
John Harvey hated the side 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

(55:35):
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
fucking 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

(55:56):
the devil, so like there was not a lot of
hard science of the just graduating with flying. Your whole
test is just water with a question mark and you
write yes, you nod, congratulations doctor. You take a simple
water and go. And that was my dissertation. You know

(56:17):
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 gotta fix everything.
You're a prodigy. Didn't even go through an apple sauce space,

(56:38):
straight to water. You see what 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 assholes, that
was the wrong It's water, bug, guy, I don't even
gotta tell you where you putting those scorpions. Stop that. Yeah,
none of us, none of us have pissed right for

(56:59):
a week. So he realizes that this medical school his
church creates is complete bullshit. But his time at Ellen
White's nonsense school of Long Baths ignited a very real
interest in medical science. Dr Brian Wilson writes, quote John
Harvey's time at the college did whet his appetite for

(57:19):
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 White's financial backing, he attended first the College of
Medicine and Surgery at the University of Michigan, and then

(57:41):
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 E. G. Janeway, was also introduced to advances in
physiotherapy and surgery. Intensely proud of his achievement, Kellogg graduated
with a regular m d. From Bellevue in eighteen seventy five.

(58:03):
Later in the eighteen eighties, 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
eighteen eighty three in Vienna with Adolf Adolf bill Roth,
who Kellog characterized as the greatest surgeon of the nineteenth century,
and everyone seems to agree he was. John Harvey Kellogg
was an incredibly gifted surgeon. Like he is. He is

(58:24):
a nonsense doctor too, but he's also a deeply gifted
regular surgeon who was 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 again. Actually good at fucking surgery. Anything else, Yeah,
he's anything else. So he becomes an actual doctor and

(58:49):
returns to Battle Creek from getting his m d. In
eighteen seventy five and immediately joins the staff at his
religion's nonsense medical school again, and it became immediately apparent
that no and 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 jibbering maniac,
Kellogg was almost immediately promoted to superintendent of the institute,

(59:11):
which was probably the best call you could have made. Like,
you've got the real doctor and the guy who believe
Satan invented chemistry. I guess we picked the real here. Thanks.
And then that doctor is like, well, I guess the
student has become the teachers. Where don't you go talk to? Yeah? Yeah,

(59:38):
so uh yeah. He was like twenty six 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,

(59:59):
homeopath 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

(01:00:20):
old newspaper complained about this, pointing out that no one
wouldn't 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 Dr Kellogg wanted to make. He wanted to create
a place where people learned how to stay well. Kellogg's
vision was a mixture of like a quack hospital and

(01:00:43):
quack medical school, but also a real hospital and something
akin to a health spat 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 have as one of
which is that you don't the the ideal was not
to treat people for illnesses. It's to keep them healthy, right,

(01:01:03):
which is fair like a reasonable thing for a doctor exactly.
And he kind of he turns the sanitarium into like
a preventive 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

(01:01:25):
the a m A's Journal, advertising the Sanitarium as 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 a grand hotel, the
sand was touted as offering a carefully monitored vegetarian diet,
a variety of physical therapies, including rational hydropathy, Swedish movements, calistenics,
breathing exercises, and eventually electric light and heat therapies. Now

(01:01:49):
there's a lot of questions that that paragraph raises, I
bet you're wondering, first off, what rational hydropathy might include.
I'm gonna let a write up from history dot com
explain that. In a nineteen o seven ad in Good
Housekeeping magazine, the Battle Creek Sanitarium boasted of offering forty
six kinds of baths. Some like foot baths and sponge baths,
were relatively conventional, but there were also options like the

(01:02:12):
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. Oh that's rational hydropic.
That's the ractional to stay at a bath for months,
and they would You could get up to use the restroom,

(01:02:32):
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. So you'd
get up to take a dump and then they're just
pouring buckets of water on you, or keep always be bathing.
Oh my god. Kellogg advocated continuous baths as a treatment

(01:02:54):
for skin diseases, chronic diarrhea, and a host of mental maladies,
including delirium, hysteria, and maine. You I kind of think
a week'slong bath might not help you in a weird
place you in. Kellogg was fascinated by the evolving therapies
of the day. He would regularly read about some new
health fad and fall in love with it. Dr kellub

(01:03:16):
would generally frame this is paying attention to the latest
medical developments, but many of the fadcy embraced had little
scientific basis. For example, he became a disciple of Horace Flesher,
a health guru who traced many health problems to poor
chewing discipline. Fletcher believed people needed to chew each bite
at least forty times, sometimes you'll hear thirty four before swallowing.
As a result, Dr Kellogg would lead dinners in the

(01:03:38):
sanitarium with renditions of the Chewing Song, the chorus of
which was chew too, cho that is the thing to do.
Oh you you sounds like a hoot. Kellogg was a
believer in what he called auto intoxication, which resulted from

(01:03:58):
the putrefaction of n jested meat in the bowels. He
believed that otto 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

(01:04:19):
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 butt, right.
John Harvey's enemas were administered by a special machine of
his own design that could pump fifteen quarts of water
per minute through his patient's bowls. What more is better? Baby? Wait?

(01:04:45):
Nearly four fucking gallons a minute? What absolutely outrageous? Yere
gonna fucking pressure wash? You're just whole shit like that. Yeah,
he's basically taking pressure watcher from like a car washing
shooting up his own design. He just designed a weird

(01:05:07):
nozzle to put in your asshole. 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? Yet? That was absolutely think I think
it could hit harder yeah, you knowlem with is that

(01:05:32):
water per minute up your asshole? It's not looking like
a busted fire hydrant on a summer day in New York.
The Sanitarium group grew famous both due to kellogg skill
and 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 Truth's doctor,

(01:05:53):
and he would go on to treat Thomas Edison, Henry Ford,
and Amelia Earhart. Before long, the Sanitarium was the hit
place for the rich and famous to go and receive
medical care. Here's how one ad from the early nineteen
hundreds 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

(01:06:17):
resort in the world, a mecca for vacationists, a cool
and delightful summer resting place. Outdoor life encouraged swimming, golf, tennis, volleyball,
motoring and tramping m yeah, tramping. Systematized diet of simple
and delicious foods, expert bath facilities and the most efficient

(01:06:37):
medical service if desired, accommodations for two thousand guests, planning
your vacation early. So yeah, that's it's it's like a spat.
It's like a med spa. It is a med SPA
describing the butthole destroyer. They don't they in the ads,
we will ruin your rasshole, absolutely lay waste to that thing.

(01:07:04):
There will there will not even be a whole when
were you don't want? I'm on, I could, I could
say a lot of disc a lot of metaphors that
aren't explicit, but you get the picture, you know, sock.
So let's make sure that you know what we're doing
over there. Don't get too too well on that thing now.
So far, John Harvey sounds, you know, kind of out there,

(01:07:26):
but not evil, right, no evil yet, Like it's definitely
not the best health decision to water in and out,
but it's not. He's not. You're not a monster if
you think that's especially it's the eighteen eighties, eighteen nineties.
It's it's better than a lot of what doctors are doing.
You know, you're not probably going to die from that

(01:07:47):
um like you would from the strict nine treatments. Um
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 HARVEYT. Kellogg had been influenced
by Graham's teachings. This led him to advocate a vegetarian

(01:08:09):
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 masturbation was among the
greatest human evils, and I'm at a hote now from
a wonderful write up in Jezebel. Masturbation could begin in
the most tragic of cases, at a young age. Kellog
reported that he had seen children as young as two

(01:08:30):
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

(01:08:52):
their private parts. These manipulations came from dark and foul
sources such as constipation, hemorrhoids, bladder infections, anal fishers, and
uncleanliness of the organs. Other foul temptations were to be
found in choice of betting, said Dr Kellogg. Soft pillows
and soft beds and pillows must be carefully avoided the
floor with a single folded blanket beneath the sleeper would

(01:09:13):
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 at pillows can't stop people from wanting to masturbate.
Nothing short of physical torture and mutilation is going to
stop an adolescent from experimenting with their own genitals. And
as we'll discuss in Part two, physical torture and mutilation

(01:09:37):
is exactly where doctor John Harvey Kellogg decided to go.
So next episode is gonna be a rough one miles
and everyone listening real bad. Just some of the worst
stuff will ever talk about on this show, real real
dark shit, real black pill hours here my friends. Oh well,
you know that's uh. I feel like I'm always here

(01:09:57):
for these ones. But you know, I'm built different. We
talked about we had you on for the Trump University one.
You've had your fun episode, had fun ones, and then
we've also had absolutely fucked ones. But hey, you know what,
that's what this show is. You know what I mean.
If you want fucking good times, go listen and you
know whatever. That Yeah, that's ship. That's the show where

(01:10:17):
we won't spend an hour on Thursday talking about female
genitally anyway. Yeah, we'll just talk about ship jokes a
lot probably, and that 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.

(01:10:41):
There's your warning. Okay, vegetables and just get to be
a ton of emotional and sexual abuse. It's going to
be bad. So listen it on Thursday. Alright, Miles, just
to have self care your mental health. Now, Uh well,

(01:11:01):
I'll see you on Part two. Yeah, eat some graham
crackers and pound it. Yeah, wait anything, Okay, eat some
Graham crackers and masterbrade unless that's your thing, unless it
helps you come and you know, if you have any
insight into the bug field, I would. I'm honestly really
interested in this. Will please my my my plug double

(01:11:22):
is please approaching me with bug doctor information? Bug doctor
what what the fund was? Yeah? H

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.css-14f5ked{margin:0;word-break:break-word;display:-webkit-box;-webkit-box-orient:vertical;box-orient:vertical;-webkit-line-clamp:2;overflow:hidden;}Part One: Kellogg: The Great American Cum Doctor