The Road to Wellville (2 page)

D
r. John Harvey Kellogg, inventor of the corn flake and peanut butter, not to mention caramel-cereal coffee, Bromose, Nuttolene and some seventy-five other gastrically correct foods, paused to level his gaze on the heavyset woman in the front row. He was having difficulty believing what he’d just heard. As was the audience, judging from the gasp that arose after she’d raised her hand, stood shakily and demanded to know what was so sinful about a good porterhouse steak—it had done for the pioneers, hadn’t it? And for her father and his father before him?

The Doctor pushed reflectively at the crisp white frames of his spectacles. To all outward appearances he was a paradigm of concentration, a scientist formulating his response, but in fact he was desperately trying to summon her name—who was she, now? He knew her, didn’t he? That nose, those eyes … he knew them all, knew them by name, a matter of pride … and then, in a snap, it came to him: Tindermarsh. Mrs. Violet. Complaint, obesity. Underlying cause, autointoxication.
Tindermarsh.
Of
course.
He couldn’t help feeling a little self-congratulatory flush of pride—nearly a thousand patients and he could call up any one of them as plainly as if he had their charts spread out before him…. But enough of that—the audience was stirring, a
monolithic force, one great naked psyche awaiting the hand to clothe it. Dr. Kellogg cleared his throat.

“My dear Mrs. Tindermarsh, I do thank you for your question,” he began, hardly able to restrain his dainty feet from breaking into dance even as the perfect riposte sprang to his lips, “but I wonder how many of those flesh-abusing pioneers lived past the age of forty?” (A murmur from the audience as the collective image of a skeletal man in coonskin cap, dead of salt pork and flapjacks, rose before their eyes.) “And how many of them, your own reverend forebears not excepted, went to bed at night and had a minute’s sleep that wasn’t racked with dyspepsia and the nightmare of carnal decay?” He paused to let that horrible thought sink in. “I say to you, Mrs. Tindermarsh, and to the rest of you ladies and gentlemen of the audience, and I say it with all my heart”—pause, two beats—“a steak is every bit as deadly as a gun. Worse. At least if one points a gun at one’s head and pulls the trigger, the end comes with merciful swiftness, but a steak—ah, the exquisite and unremitting agonies of the flesh eater, his colon clogged with its putrefactive load, the blood settling in his gut, the carnivore’s rage building in his brittle heart—a steak kills day by day, minute by minute, through the martyrdom of a lifetime.”

He had them now—he could see the fear and revulsion in their eyes, the grim set of their jaws as they each inwardly totted up the steaks and sausages, the chops and pullets and geese consumed over the course of the greedy, oblivious years. “But don’t take my word for it,” he said, waving his arms expansively, “let’s be scientific about it. After all, the Sanitarium stands as a monument to biologic living and scientific analysis, a veritable University of Health. Let’s just perform a little experiment here—right here, on the spur of the moment.” He ducked away from the spotlight and called out in a suddenly stentorian voice: “Frank? Dr. Frank Linniman?”

A flurry from the rear of the auditorium, movement, the craning of three hundred necks, and all at once the summoned assistant was striding briskly up the aisle, his chin thrust forward, his carriage flawless. The audience took one look at him and knew that here was a man who would unflinchingly throw himself over a cliff if his Chief required it
of him. He came to a halt before the podium and gazed up into the brilliant light. “Yes, Doctor?”

“Do you know the Post Tavern? The finest hostelry in Battle Creek—or, for that matter, anywhere else in this grand state of Michigan?” This was nothing, a bit of stagemanship, and the Doctor had been through it a dozen times before, yet still the image of Charlie Post, blandly handsome, effortlessly tall, a very Judas of a man, rose up before him like an assassin’s blade, and it ever so slightly soured the moment for him.

“I know it, Doctor.”

Dr. Kellogg was a diminutive man himself. It wasn’t so much that he was short, he liked to say—it was just that his legs weren’t long enough. Sit him in a chair and he was as tall as the next fellow. Of course, as he’d grown into his fifties, he’d expanded a bit on the horizontal plane, but that was all right—it gave him a glow of portly health and authority, an effect he enhanced by dressing entirely in white. Tonight, as always, he was a marvel of whiteness, a Santa Claus of health, from his flawless white high-button shoes to the cusp of his Vandyke and the fine pale tenacious hair that clung to his scalp. He paused a moment to take a sip from his water glass and rinse the taste of Charlie Post from his mouth.

Setting the glass back down, he glanced up briefly and saw that the audience was hanging on his every gesture; half a dozen of them were actually gaping. He gave them a sagacious look and then focused on his assistant. “Frank, I want you to go to the chef there—a chef of international renown, I’m told, an epicure Mr. Post has imported from Paris, a Monsieur Delarain, isn’t it?—and I want you to purchase the finest steak he has available and bring it back here, to this very stage, for our inspection.”

A tentative ripple of laughter, the scrape of chair legs.

“Well, go, Frank—fly. What are you waiting for?”

“A steak, sir?” Frank knew the routine, God bless him, as sturdy a straight man as you could hope to find.

“Not just
a
steak, Frank—the finest steak money can buy.”

Frank’s face was an open book. He was guileless, as baffled as the
audience, his only desire to gratify his Chief. “I’ll be back in a twinkling,” he announced, and he was already turning away, already poised to dash up the aisle, when the Doctor spoke again.

“And Frank,” he said, drawing it out, “Frank, would you do me one other great favor?”

Silence. Not a breath expelled anywhere in the house.

“Would you stop at the livery stable and pick up a sample of another sort—for comparison, that is?” The Doctor chuckled amiably, avuncular, warm, the very avatar of geniality and good sense. “I’m referring to a bit of, well, horse excretus”—stunned laughter, picking up now, gales of it, so lusty the sequel could barely be heard—“about four hundred forty-eight grams, to be precise … or the size of a good sixteen-ounce steak.”

It was a typical Monday night at the Battle Creek Sanitarium, bastion of right thinking, vegetarianism and self-improvement, citadel of temperance and dress reform, and, not coincidentally, the single healthiest spot on the planet. The women were uncorseted, the men slack in their suspenders, both sexes quietly percolating over the toxin-free load of dinner in an atmosphere cleansed of tobacco, alcohol, corned beef, mutton chops and the coffee jitters. Stomachs full, minds at rest, they were gathered in the Grand Parlor to hear their Chief instruct them on matters relating to physical well-being and its happy concomitant, longevity. They might have been at Baden or Worishofen or Saratoga, but instead they were assembled here in the icebox of south-central Michigan—and paying a handsome price for the privilege—because there was no place on the map to equal it.

In the thirty-one years of his directorship, Dr. Kellogg had transformed the San, as it was affectionately known, from an Adventist boarding house specializing in Graham bread and water cures to the “Temple of Health” it had now become, a place celebrated from coast to coast—and across the great wide weltering Atlantic to London, Paris, Heidelberg and’ beyond. Twenty-eight hundred patients annually passed through its portals, and one thousand employees, including twenty full-time
physicians and three hundred nurses and bath attendants, saw to their needs; Six stories high, with a gleaming lobby half the size of a football field, with four hundred rooms and treatment facilities for a thousand, with elevators, central heating and cooling, indoor swimming pools and a whole range of therapeutic diversions and wholesome entertainments, the San was the sine qua non of the cure business—luxury hotel, hospital and spa all rolled into one.

And the impresario, the overseer, the presiding genius behind it all, was John Harvey Kellogg. Preaching dietary restraint and the simple life, he eased overweight housewives and dyspeptic businessmen along the path to enlightenment and recovery. Severe cases—the cancerous, the moribund, the mentally unbalanced and the disfigured—were rejected. The San’s patients tended to be of a certain class, and they really had no interest in sitting across the dining table from the plebeian or the pedestrian or those who had the bad grace to be truly and dangerously ill. No, they came to the San to see and be seen; to mingle with the celebrated, the rich and the preposterously rich; to think positively, eat wisely and subdue their afflictions with a good long pious round of pampering, abstention and rest.

At this juncture, in the fall of 1907, the San numbered among its guests such luminaries as Admiral Nieblock of the U.S. Naval Academy, Upton and Meta Sinclair, Horace B. Fletcher, and Tiepolo Cappucini, the great Italian tenor, as well as a smattering of state and national legislators, captains of industry, entertainers and assorted dukes, con-tessas and baronets. On the horizon were visits by Henry Ford, Harvey Firestone, Thomas Edison, Admiral Richard M. Byrd and the voluminous William Howard Taft. Dr. Kellogg was no fool, and he extracted as much benefit as he could from these dignataries, in terms of both promotional service and raw cash donations. He knew, too, that a diet of Protose fillets, beet tops and nut savory broth, combined with a prohibition on artificial stimulants and long unbroken stretches of ruminative time, might prove a bit, well, dull to the high-livers and men and women of action among his patients. And so he kept them busy, with a regimen of sports, exercise, rest and treatment, and he kept them entertained, too. There were concerts, lectures, sleigh rides, grand marches and sing-alongs. The Jubilee Singers might appear one night
and George W. Leitch, twenty years in India and with his stereopticon slides in hand, the next. Or it would be “Professor” Sammy Siegel, hot off the vaudeville circuit, milking the strings of his mandolin, or the Tozer Twins and their trained dachshunds. And on Monday nights, without fail, the Chief himself took possession of the podium and held it for two and a half rapid-fire hours, enlightening his charges, edifying them and, as much as possible, scaring them half to death.

In the fifteen minutes it took Frank Linniman to trot down to the Post Tavern and back, the Doctor fielded two more questions. The first was from a gentleman in the rear (Mr. Abernathy, wasn’t it? Gout, consumption and nerves?) who wanted to know of the dangers of tight-lacing among fashionable females who unnaturally constricted their midsections to achieve the “wedding ring” waist. The Doctor repeated the question for the benefit of those up front who might not have heard, and then, after stroking the white silk of his beard a moment, shot an admonitory forefinger into the air. “My dear sir, I can tell you without exaggeration that if the number of deaths recorded annually as a result of just such frivolous tight-lacing were properly recorded, you would be truly appalled. As a medical intern at Bellevue, I had occasion to be present for the autopsy of one such unfortunate woman—a woman, I might add, not yet out of her twenties. In any case, we found to our astonishment that her organs had been totally disarranged, the liver pushed up into the lungs and the intestines so effectively blocked they might just as well have been stoppered with a cork.” He shook his fine head wearily and let out a sigh that could be heard in the back row. “A pity,” he said, his voice cast low. “I tell you, it brought tears to my eyes.”