Part 12

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.”

Dr. Kellogg publishes a big magazine of large circulation named _Good Health_; and in this he teaches that health is not a mere negation of ailments—a state of being free from rheumatism, or consumption, or biliousness, or any other of the “thousand natural shocks that flesh is heir to”—but that it is being wholesome, happy, sane, complete, a unit—a man or woman eating, drinking, sleeping, working, playing, functioning in all parts as naturally, as inevitably, as easily and as unconsciously, as a flower grows.

One of the writers has told of his experience many years ago, when he went to a physician and requested to be helped in keeping well. He went to Battle Creek Sanitarium on account of the illness of his wife, and when one of the physicians proposed to him that he himself undergo the treatments, he answered (having in mind this earlier experience, and of the doubts it had bred in him), “There is nothing the matter with me at present that I know of.” The answer of the Sanitarium physician was, “The less there is the matter with you the better, from our point of view.” And so he realized that at last he had found a place where his own idea of health-preservation was understood.

He accepted joyfully the offer to assist him in getting a scientific understanding of his own bodily condition. A drop of his blood was taken and analyzed, microscopically and chemically. He went to the diet table, and for three days ate precisely measured quantities of specified foods; during the period all his excretions were weighed and analyzed and examined under the microscope. A thorough physical examination was made, and also a series of tests, upon a machine invented by Dr. Kellogg, to register the strength of each group of muscles of the body. The results of all these examinations were presented to him in an elaborate set of reports and charts, together with a prescription for treatments, diet and exercise. He had stated that there was nothing the matter with him, so far as he knew. He found that anaerobes—the dangerous bacterial inhabitants of the intestinal tract—numbered something over four billion to the gram of intestinal contents—a gram being about a thirtieth part of an ounce. During the six weeks of his stay at the Sanitarium the more important of these tests were repeated weekly; and when he left, the number of anaerobes had been reduced nearly ninety per cent.

Dr. Kellogg terms the system of treatment employed by the Sanitarium the Physiologic Method, and he writes of it as follows:

“The Physiologic Method consists in the treatment of the sick by natural, physical, or physiologic means scientifically applied.

“The haphazard or empirical use of water, electricity, Swedish movements, and allied measures is not the Physiologic Method. It is no method at all. It is empiricism, at best; at its worst, it is quackery. The application of the Physiologic Method requires much more than simply a knowledge of the technique of baths, electricity, movements, etc. It requires a thorough knowledge of physiology, and an intelligent grasp of all the resources of modern medical science. For, while the Physiologic Method depends for its curative effects upon those natural agencies which are the means of preserving health, and which may be relied upon to prevent disease as well as to cure, it recognizes and employs as supplementary remedies, all rational means which have by experience been proved to be effective.

“The Physiologic Method concerns itself first of all with causes. In the case of chronic maladies, these will generally be found in erroneous habits of life, which, through long operation, have resulted in depreciating the vital forces of the body and so deranging the bodily functions that the natural defenses have been finally broken down and morbid conditions have been established.

“Chronic disease is like a fire in the walls of a house which has slowly worked its way from the foundation upward, until the flames have burst out through the roof. The appearance of the flame is the first outward indication of the mischief which has been going on; but it is not the beginning. It is rather the end of the destructive process.

“The Physiologic Method does not undertake to cure disease, but people who are diseased. It recognizes the disease process as an effort on the part of the body to recover normal conditions,—a struggle on the part of the vital forces to maintain life under abnormal conditions and to restore vital equilibrium.

“At the outset of his course of treatment, the patient is instructed that his recovery will depend very largely upon himself; that the curative power does not reside in the doctor or in the treatment, but is a vital force operating within the patient himself. The Physiologic Method is based upon this fact. [Illustration: A GROUP AT THE BATTLE CREEK SANITARIUM (DR. KELLOGG ON THE RIGHT).]

“So the treatment of a patient consists, first of all, in the exact regulation of all his habits of life, and the establishment of wholesome conditions. The simple life and return to Nature are the ideals constantly held up before him. He must work out his own salvation; he must ‘cease to do evil and learn to do well’; he must cease to sow seeds of disease, and by every means in his power cultivate health.”

XV

HEALTH REFORM AND THE COMMITTEE OF ONE HUNDRED

We have set forth the underlying principles of the new art of health; and we have shown how these principles may be applied by individuals, and how they have been formulated and taught at the great University of Health at Battle Creek. It remains to give an account of a great national movement which has for its aim the spreading of a knowledge of the new hygiene in a semi-political way, a circumstance which to our minds proves that not only this nation but the whole of modern civilization is on the eve of a great revolution in its habits of living, and that this revolution will have for its rallying cry the word “Knowledge.” And more especially, “Knowledge of Our Bodies, and of How to Care for Them.”

The state of ignorance of the majority of people concerning the workings of their own bodies and the way to take care of them is to-day one of the greatest barriers to human progress. Few people realize that they ought to care for their bodies; or that they ought to know about their bodies until they are actually broken down. Men use their intelligence more aptly elsewhere; but all progress in other directions, in the arts and crafts and the labors of modern industry, will go for nothing if we do not learn to apply our intelligence to the matter of health.

More and more does the need for knowledge press home upon us. It is impossible for the race to survive unless that knowledge is spread. Our ancestors, it is true, knew less of their bodily make-up and bodily care than we do, but our ancestors did not need it so much. They were country dwellers, and people of the open air; they were not slaves of machinery and of office routine.

Dr. J. Pease Norton, Assistant Professor of Political Economy at Yale University, recently read before the American Association for the Advancement of Science, a paper which vividly summed up the situation which confronts us. He said:

“There are four great wastes to-day, the more lamentable because they are unnecessary. They are preventable death, preventable sickness, preventable conditions of low physical and mental efficiency, and preventable ignorance. The magnitude of these wastes is testified to by experts competent to judge. They fall like the shades of night over the whole human race, blotting out its fairest years of happiness.

“The facts are cold and bare—one million, five hundred thousand persons must die in the United States during the next twelve months; equivalent to four million, two hundred thousand persons will be constantly sick; over five million homes, consisting of twenty-five million persons, will be made more or less wretched by mortality and morbidity.

“We look with horror on the black pages of the Middle Ages. The black waste was but a passing cloud compared with the white waste visitation. Of people living to-day, over eight million will die of tuberculosis, and the federal government does not raise a hand to help them.

“THE NEGLECT OF HEALTH A NATIONAL EVIL”

“The Department of Agriculture spends seven million dollars on plant health and animal health every year, but, with the exception of the splendid work done by Doctors Wiley, Atwater, and Benedict, Congress does not directly appropriate one cent for promoting the physical well-being of babies. Thousands have been expended in stamping out cholera among swine, but not one dollar was ever voted for eradicating pneumonia among human beings. Hundreds of thousands are consumed in saving the lives of elm trees from the attacks of beetles; in warning farmers against blights affecting potato plants; the importing Sicilian bugs to fertilize fig blossoms in California; in ostracizing various species of weeds from the ranks of the useful plants, and in exterminating parasitic growths that prey on fruit trees. In fact, the Department of Agriculture has expended during the last ten years over forty-sixmillions of dollars. But not a wheel of the official machinery at Washington was ever set in motion for the alleviation or cure of diseases of the heart or kidneys, which will carry off over six millions of our entire population. Eight millions will perish of pneumonia, and the entire event is accepted by the American people with a resignation equal to that of the Hindoo, who, in the midst of indescribable filth, calmly awaits the day of cholera.

“During the next census period more than six million infants under two years of age will end their little spans of life while mothers sit by and watch in utter helplessness. And yet this number could probably be decreased by as much as half. But nothing is done.

“In the United States alone, of the eighty millions living to-day, all must die, after having lived, say a little more than three billion, two hundred million years of life, on the average slightly more than twoscore years. Of these years, one billion, six hundred million, represent the unproductive years of childhood and training.

“Consider that the burden of the unproductive years on the productive years is 20-20, or say 100 per cent. Could the average length of life be increased to sixty years, say to forty-eight billion years lived by eighty millions of people, the burden of the unproductive years would fall to 50 per cent. In the judgment of men competent to hold opinions, this is not impossible.”

It was the reading of this paper, which led to the formation of the Committee of One Hundred on National Health, of which Professor Irving Fisher of Yale is president, and which includes among its members such men and women as Ex-President Eliot of Harvard, Dr. Lyman Abbott, Miss Jane Addams, Luther Burbank, Horace Fletcher, Professor Chittenden, Dr. Kellogg, and Dr. Trudeau.

The primary and immediate purpose of the Committee’s work is to promote the idea of a national Bureau of Health; but the field open to the committee includes the whole subject of public sanitation and hygiene. President Roosevelt has formally endorsed the work, in a letter from which the following is an extract: “Our national health is physically our greatest national asset. To prevent any possible deterioration of the American stock should be a national ambition. We cannot too strongly insist on the necessity of proper ideals for the family, for simple life and for those habits and tastes which produce vigor and make more capable of strenuous service to our country. The preservation of national vigor should be a matter of patriotism.... Federal activity in these matters has already developed greatly, until it now includes quarantine, meat inspection, pure food administration, and federal investigation of the conditions of child labor. It is my hope that these important activities may be still further developed.”

And in his notable message to the country, rather than to Congress, which he issued in December, 1907, President Roosevelt wrote: “There is a constantly growing interest in this country in the question of public health. At least, the public mind is awake to the fact that many diseases, notably tuberculosis, are national scourges. The work of the State and City Boards of Health should be supplemented by the constantly increasing interest on the part of the national government. The Congress has already provided a Bureau of Public Health, and has provided for an hygienic report. There are other valuable laws relating to the public health connected with the various departments. This whole branch of the government should be strengthened and aided in every way.”

As somebody said before, these things are no more true because a President has said them; but the fact that President Roosevelt has said them, has given wide publicity to them, and impressed them upon the public consciousness.

The knowledge that economic conditions;—the way in which men and women live because they have to so live in order to earn a living, is the fundamental factor in the case of public health, is something that is bound to become recognized as the growth of knowledge goes on. It will only be a question of time before men and women will see that in order to have health, it will be necessary to organize all the affairs of life with a view to the well-being of humanity as a whole.

In order to make effective the work of the Committee of One Hundred, its President, Irving Fisher, assisted by Professor Norton, organized the American Health League, which has absorbed the Public Health Defense League, an organization formed for the purpose of fighting the patent medicine evil, and awakening public interest in matters of hygiene. The Health League already numbers nine or ten thousand citizens, who are pledged to give financial and moral support to the work of the Committee of One Hundred in its efforts to establish a national Bureau of Health. The League is rapidly increasing in membership, for a spirit of interest in hygiene is abroad in the land. Local advisory committees have already been formed in more than two hundred cities and towns, and it is planned to prosecute the work of multiplying these branch committees until every town in the United States shall be represented in the membership. The Committee of One Hundred publishes the magazine _American Health_ as its official organ, and all American men and women who are interested in the spread of the new hygiene are invited by the Committee to correspond with its Executive Secretary, Drawer 30, New Haven, Conn.

Connected with the advisory and other subcommittees, are committees of writers, editors, and newspaper men, numbering many of our most prominent penmen and pressmen, and the power of molding public opinion through this channel alone is very great. There is now being organized a Council on Co-operation, to consist of the leading officers of American religions, fraternal, learned, secret, and educational organizations; and also a Council of Research, to consist of leading investigators interested in original research along public health lines.

In other words, the Committee of One Hundred has grown to a compact, well-organized, rapidly-spreading, national Army of Health. It has grown within a wonderfully short period, simply because there was a great and pressing _need_ for it.

Professor William H. Welch, a member of the Committee of One Hundred, and Professor of Pathology at Johns Hopkins University, has put himself on record as saying that if the nation were to apply in practice the existing knowledge of hygiene, the nation’s death rate would be cut in two. In commenting on this statement, Irving Fisher said:

“The greatest asset of all, the physical health of our citizens, is still neglected. Professor Nicholson, an economist of Scotland, has estimated that the living capital of Great Britain is worth five times the physical capital. That is, if we capitalize each man’s working capacity and add together this capitalization throughout the whole realm of Great Britain, the value of the population so obtained is five times the value of all the land and all the railroads and all the buildings, and all the iron mines and all the other capital which is ordinarily called wealth. If we could make this human capital within the United States double its present worth (it is already five times that of the inanimate capital), it is evident what an enormous improvement would ensue as compared with the possible improvements in saving arid lands, and other physical resources. Our health has much more than a money value. But these calculations show that even on the most materialistic method of reckoning, there is truth in Emerson’s statement, “the first wealth is health.”

APPENDIX

DIET LIST

Proteid Carbo Fat % Water % Mineral Food Value % hydrate Matter per pound % % calories