From 1866, over the next few years, Seventh-day Adventist church members and stockholders saw the Battle Creek, Michigan, Institute’s crowded conditions and pressed for larger buildings. But a few of the church leaders—particularly James and Ellen White, two of the church's founders—realized that the Institute needed more physicians to serve its growing patient clientele adequately. They urged instead that additional physicians be educated. In the fall of 1872, they sent four promising young people to the Hygieo-Therapeutic College in New Jersey.
At the end of the course James White, the president of the Church, encouraged the most promising of the four, John Harvey Kellogg, to attend the Medical School of the University of Michigan, and then loaned him $1,000 for further education at Bellevue Hospital Medical College in New York. There he was one of a select group of six students who received daily instructions from the prestigious Drs. Austin Flint Sr., and Edward Janeway—this, in addition to the regular medical course from which he was graduated on February 25, 1875. Throughout his life Dr. Kellogg engaged in arduous study of medical journals, textbooks, and clinical problems, investing, by 1908, $15,000 in a personal medical library and $50,000 in observation of and instruction by American and European specialists, particularly noted surgeons.
When John Harvey Kellogg, MD, joined the Institute staff in 1875, he began a professional career that was to span 68 years. A year later, in 1876, the Institute’s Board appointed him Medical Superintendent. Since its beginnings in 1866 the institute had been a "sanatorium," an establishment that provided therapy by physical agents (such as hydrotherapy) combined with diet, exercise, and other measures for treatment or rehabilitation. However, the next year, 1877, Kellogg changed the name of the Institute to the Battle Creek Medical and Surgical Sanitarium. The word "sanitarium" meant the same as sanatorium, but Kellogg invested it with the concept of sanitation—it would identify the institution as one in which "sanitary" precautions were taken to prevent the growth and spread of germs.
He chose this spelling of the word sanitarium in 1877, the same year that Joseph Lister, surgeon to Queen Victoria, having experimented with "antiseptic surgery," became chief surgeon at King's College near London. Also, in 1877, Louis Pasteur presented his "germ theory" to the French Academy of Sciences. Kellogg believed the sanitarium's name "would come to mean a 'place where people learn to stay well.'” Kellogg often remarked in later years that the Sanitarium was more a 'university of health' than it was a hospital. He consistently regarded the institution's teaching function as its most important function."
The Sanitarium developed the reputation of being among the most scientifically motivated in the world, both in procedures and equipment. It used medications when necessary, but emphasized a simple lifestyle and healthy diet. Leaders of the institution believed and taught that many diseases are caused by a violation of nature's laws and that the best way to prevent those diseases is to obey those laws. The mission of the church has always been to encourage spiritual development of the individual, and members believe that this takes place most freely and fully within a healthy body.
The moving force largely responsible for the institution's phenomenal success was John Harvey Kellogg, MD. Kellogg influenced the worldwide development and philosophy of Seventh-day Adventist medicine more than did anyone except Ellen G. White. He also provided early scientific evidence to document much of Mrs. White's counsel on health (a lifestyle that eventually led to Loma Linda being identified by National Geographic magazine as the only “Blue Zone” in America because of the longevity of its residents).
To promote "biologic living," Kellogg spoke to hundreds of thousands of Americans throughout the nation in more than 5,000 public speeches. He lectured at Northwestern University, the University of Michigan, Tuskegee Institute, Stanford University, Boston College of Physicians and Surgeons, and numerous other places. He outlined health practices to 7,000 persons in the Mormon Tabernacle in Salt Lake City at the request of Mormon President Wilford Woodruff.
Kellogg coined the phrase "biologic living" to sum up the system of healthful living he spent his life promoting—a system that, generally speaking, reflected the influence of the health counsels of Ellen White and of the era's most sensible health reformers. To help people stay well and prevent disease he taught obedience to natural law as a moral duty, necessary to physical and mental health. Biologic living also required total abstinence from alcohol, tea, coffee, tobacco, and animal flesh. It included proper diet, adequate rest and exercise, fresh air, healthful dress, and (in case of illness) simple, natural remedies.
Kellogg emphasized that man's natural diet was vegetables, fruits, nuts, and grains; and he widely advocated such a diet. To vary the vegetarian diets of his patients, Dr. Kellogg invented some grain and nut food products, including peanut butter and flaked breakfast cereals.
The State of Michigan House of Representatives recognized Dr. Kellogg’s contributions to mankind at the time of the Battle Creek Sanitarium’s Centennial Celebration on September 5, 1966. House Resolution No. 470 stated that the Battle Creek Sanitarium was “far in advance of its time—of the indissolubility of body, mind and spirit in maintaining health, and in treatment of disease…vindicated fully in current medical knowledge and practice….” It further identified John Harvey Kellogg, M.D, as a Fellow of the American College of Surgeons, a member of the Royal Academy of Science, and the “Institution’s presiding genius.”
At the time of Dr. Kellogg’s last birthday in 1943, the Battle Creek Enquirer-News published a feature story under the headline, “His Work Felt by the Whole World—Dr. John Harvey Kellogg a Factor in Civilization.”