The heritage of Loma Linda can best be appreciated when we understand its prehistory. The Loma Linda experience evolved from two sources: the legacy of “Seventh-day Adventist Medicine” in Battle Creek, Michigan, and the heritage of the San Bernardino Valley.
“With little prudence, any man can soon get rich in Mich-i-gan." In the 1830s, the words and catchy tune of this popular ballad infected many young people, and John Preston Kellogg, living on the banks of the Connecticut River across from Northampton, Massachusetts, was no exception. His ancestors had lived there since 1661, and he was tempted to move "out west." Kellogg's friend Lansing Dickinson, already in Michigan, wrote glowing reports. A public notice at the Northampton trading center described lush Michigan property for sale for $1.25 per acre.
In July 1834, Kellogg loaded his wife, Mary, their two sons, Merritt and Smith Moses, and their household possessions onto a horse-drawn carriage and headed for the Erie Canal at Albany, New York, where they boarded a horse-drawn barge. Opened in 1825, the canal connected New York communities with the Great Lakes. Stopping at a Michigan trading post—Detroit, population 5,000—Kellogg bought another horse-drawn carriage and headed for Dickinson's Settlement, near today's Flint, Michigan.
Kellogg declined to pay $2,000 for 80 acres of recommended land that was to become downtown Flint. Instead, he bought 320 acres two miles away for $400. Kellogg established his family in an abandoned one-room log cabin. The Kelloggs survived their first Michigan winter; and, when weather and health permitted, they cleared the forest to provide cropland and built a two-story 18-x-24-foot log cabin.
But the Kelloggs were usually in poor health. Mary had tuberculosis, then called consumption. The frontier doctor prescribed periodic bleeding and inhalation of resin fumes, by sprinkling the resin over a shovelful of live coals. When sick, the Kellogg children were purged, bled, and blistered—popular medical procedures of the day. Once, the frontier doctor prescribed a wasp sting to the back of Kellogg's neck "to draw out the blood" from an inflammation in his eyes.
Because of Mary's consumption, Kellogg hired Ann Stanley, a nearby blacksmith's daughter, to help with the household duties. Mary liked Ann. She told Kellogg, "If I should die, ask Ann to continue caring for our home and family." Mary died after the birth of their fifth child. Now, bereaved, almost hopelessly in debt, and frequently sick, Kellogg struggled to rear five children (one a newborn) and operate a good-sized farm. Overwhelmed, he tried to persuade Ann, who was then teaching school in nearby Threadville, to babysit. But, to her, teaching was more important than babysitting, and she said no. He pleaded with her many times. She steadfastly refused. In desperation, Kellogg asked Ann to marry him. This time she accepted.
Ann, a good wife and mother, also knew something about farming. She persuaded Kellogg to keep sheep—to provide wool for the children's clothing—and to grow clover instead of swamp grass. By selling clover seed at five dollars a bushel they were able to pay off their debt, build a large addition to their home, and buy a two-seated, light-spring wagon.
In 1849, the Kelloggs moved westward for the third time, settling in Tyrone Township near Battle Creek, Michigan. That summer their two-year-old daughter, Emma, contracted what Ann thought was a lung inflammation. But a frontier doctor from Hartland Center treated little Emma for worms. She died in convulsions. Considering what American medicine had done to them, it was little wonder the Kelloggs grew bitter.
Seventeen years later, in response to his frustration, Kellogg would help finance a worldwide health reform movement. And eventually, two of his sons would make Battle Creek, breakfast cereal, and a new kind of healthcare center, internationally famous.
The world-famous Battle Creek Sanitarium, under the direction of John Harvey Kellogg, MD, at one time the largest institution of its kind in the world, in 1928, with the addition of a 15-story tower, grew to 1,500-beds.
Early American medicine presented an often confusing and conflicting picture. In New England, for example, two leading physicians—Drs. Gallup and Tulley—actively supported two completely different schools of thought. Gallup, believing that too much blood caused inflammation and fever, removed blood ounce after ounce; usually his patient's temperature would drop. Many, including George Washington, were thus bled to death. After more than 32 ounces of his blood had been drawn without the slightest improvement in his condition, he begged his physicians to leave him alone and let him die in peace. The physicians published details of the methods employed for his relief to give assurance that he had received the best of care and that his untimely death (from acute laryngitis) occurred in spite of all that human knowledge and skill could do.
Physicians of this school of thought believed that a man with a fever had too much vitality—too much life. So they bled him to take away the "excess" vitality. Such bleeding had been common for centuries. In medieval England the craft of medicine was called leech craft, after the blood-sucking worms the physicians carried about with them. Even in the mid-1800s pharmacies had pots of leeches on their shelves.
Tulley, however, promoted treating the sick with strong drugs. He believed that as the body overcame the drugging, it would automatically overcome the causes of the original sickness. If diseases proved fatal...the misfortune was attributed to the circumstances of the remedies not being sufficiently active, or of the physician not being called in season." Physicians of the drugging school used calomel, opium, heroin, blue mass, lunar caustic, prussic acid, antimony—even mercury, arsenic, chloroform, and strychnine.
To be continued…