The new emphasis on health was truly a "fitness revolution," but it was designed to accomplish more than self-improvement. Its value lay in helping people feel good, not only so that they could be good but also so that they could do good. [1] It was directly related to the church's mission to take the gospel to "all cities, to all villages," to tell it to the world.
Health reform lay at the root of "medical missionary work." Medical missionary work in the Seventh-day Adventist movement has become many things. At one end it is an accredited medical college turning out physicians with various specialties. At the other end it is a Christian layman doing a kindness for his neighbor in the hope of relieving his distress and leading him to Christ.
Mrs. White practiced this latter kind of medical missionary work most of her life, continually taking sickly people into her home and nursing them until they got better, and frequently calling on neighbors to give home treatments to their children or to bring attractive food to adults who were not eating well. [2]
In 1902 she wrote, "We have come to a time when every member of the church should take hold of medical missionary work." [3] They could do it, she explained in various articles and testimonies, by teaching people how to cook and dress intelligently and how to give home treatments; also by praying with them when they were sick. At the 1901 General Conference she urged that medical missionary work and gospel missionary work were "never, never" to be separated. [4]
In brief, medical missionary work is the gospel in practice. It is doing kindness to others in demonstration of the love of God. It is intelligent kindness, directed toward helping people not merely to meet an emergency of illness or poverty but also to live above it ever after. And its ultimate goal is to do for others the ultimate good; namely, to bring them to Christ.
Important as sanitariums, hospitals, and medical colleges obviously are in carrying out medical missionary work, they are not the most important features of the program. "It is not numerous institutions, large buildings, or great display that God requires, but the harmonious action of a peculiar people, a people chosen by God and precious. Every man is to stand in his lot and place, thinking, speaking, and acting in harmony with the Spirit of God." [5]
The new light, incidentally, proved of special benefit to Ellen White and her own family. For example, a couple of years before her death at the ripe old age of eighty-seven--which wasn't bad for a person who, at seventeen, had been given three months to live--Arthur W. Spalding, the storyteller and historian, while visiting "Elmshaven," her home in California, offered at the close of an interview to help her up the stairs.
"Oh, no thank you," she responded brightly. "I am very able to climb the stairs by myself. Why, I am as spry as when I was a girl."
She caught herself. "As when I was a girl?" she exclaimed. "I should say so! When I was a girl, I was ill and weak and in wretched health. But now the Lord has made me well and strong, and I am better, much better, than when I was a girl." [6]
During the early years of their marriage she and James suffered more than their share of illness, for they worked too hard, slept too little, and ate too sparingly. They did so because they felt the burden of the work and received so little help from the scattered flock. (In time they came to see that God did not expect such extreme sacrifices. [7]) Besides this, Ellen suffered much more sickness than her share because, as God's special messenger, she was also Satan's chosen target. She learned this particularly in connection with the "great controversy" vision of 1858. [8]
In her early years she was often healed instantaneously. In her later years she maintained her faith when sometimes God chose not to work a miracle. Some of the finest passages in The Desire of Ages were written when she was "trusting while suffering" with rheumatoid arthritis in Australia.
The health reform vision of June 5, 1863, did not provide her with improved health without her making some radical changes in her own way of life. She had been a heavy meat eater, and she could not stand the taste of brown bread.
But she dearly wanted a healthy body so that she could serve God more effectively, and she made up her mind to obey.
She prepared a vegetarian meal and baked a batch of whole wheat bread. But it looked too repulsive to eat.
And so, as she told the story herself, she folded her arms on her lap and said, "Stomach, you may wait until you can eat bread. I will eat simple food, or I will not eat at all." [9] After the second or third missed meal she could eat. And there after she remained a vegetarian all her life, with the exception that she ate meat occasionally, especially when traveling, until 1894. After 1894 she ate no more meat during the twenty-one remaining years of her life, even on her extensive travels, convinced from the light she had received that it was unwise to do so. [10]
Elder James White was elected General Conference president in 1865. The Civil War was coming to an end and so also, for the time being, was his marvelous stock of energy. A stroke left him partially paralyzed.
Elders Loughborough and Uriah Smith were also ill at the same time, and together with the Whites they made their pathetic way to "Our Home on the Hiffside," a health resort operated by Dr. James C. Jackson and built literally on the side of a hill in Dansville, New York. The Whites knew enough by now not to depend on ordinary physicians, and Dr. Jackson offered some of the best water-and-sunshine treatments available in the country.
Uriah Smith recovered in a short time, and Loughborough too was soon well enough to go back to work. But James White, whose condition was much more serious to begin with, made only discouraging progress. Furthermore, Ellen White became increasingly worried about some of Dr. Jackson's techniques.
Dr. Jackson required his patients to relax by dancing and playing cards, and he told them to take their minds completely away from religion and to do no work at all. For a high principled, active, religious man like Elder White this was drastic indeed. In the midst of a December storm the Whites left, hoping that he would improve more rapidly at the home of some friends in Rochester.
After two weeks of special prayer on behalf of Elder White, the believers in Rochester observed December 25, Christmas Day, 1865, as a full day of fasting and prayer for his return to health. God responded by giving them (and the world) a remarkable Christmas present.
In a vision that day Ellen White was shown that the complete-rest-without-religion cure was entirely wrong, and that Adventists should establish their own water-cure-and-vegetarian institution where a properly balanced, God-fearing course of treatments could be made available not only to Adventists but to the public generally, and where they could not only be treated with sensible remedies but also be taught "how to take care of themselves and thus to prevent sickness." [11]
Two immediate results of this great "health institution" vision were (1) an inspiring demonstration in the Whites' own family of what a woman can do in nursing a sick husband, [12] and (2) the founding in 1866 of the Western Health Reform Institute in a remodeled old house in Battle Creek.
The man who did the most to build up this Health Reform Institute, and, indeed, to promote health reform in much of the world over the succeeding many years, was a diminutive (5'4"), determined, and dynamic physician by the name of John Harvey Kellogg. He well deserves a few moments of our time. [13]
John Harvey Kellogg was born into a family of sixteen children in the same year, 1852, that his father, J. P. Kellogg, accepted the Adventist faith. In 1855 Mr. Kellogg gave a fourth of the money needed to put up the little factory to house the Review and Herald handpress, and in 1856 he moved his family to Battle Creek, where he opened up a broom shop.
At the age of ten John Harvey was at work in his father's business and in 1866, at the age of fourteen, was a proofreader for the Seventh-day Adventist publishing house. This was the year when the Western Health Reform Institute was inaugurated, with J. P. Kellogg making the first and largest individual donation of $500. Little did either father or son foresee the part John was to play in the development of that institution. His ambition then was to be a schoolmaster.
As a matter of fact, John did teach school for a year; but his future lay elsewhere. In 1872 he began studying medicine at Dr. Trall's Hygeio-Therapeutic College in New Jersey, soon transferring to the medical college at Ann Arbor, Michigan, and finally to the Bellevue Medical College in New York City, the finest in the nation. Somehow Elder James White managed to find $1000 to help him with his expenses, and young Kellogg used much of it to hire faculty members to tutor him privately outside of class. His appetite for study was insatiable.
Equipped with a top-quality medical degree, Dr. Kellogg returned to Battle Creek in 1875 and a year later was made medical superintendent of the Western Health Reform Institute. There were twenty patients registered at the time. When word went around that a boy-doctor of twenty-four was taking over, it is said that six of them got up and left.
Their empty beds were soon filled. So many patients streamed into Battle Creek to take advantage of the skills of the fabulous new medical director and of his carefully selected associates that an almost continuous building program was required over the next twenty years. The name was quickly changed to Battle Creek Medical and Surgical Sanitarium, defined as a place where people "learn to stay well." By the time two of its main buildings burned in 1902, the complex had rooms for several hundred (perhaps a thousand or more) patients.
Dr. Kellogg was brilliant. He kept abreast of medical developments by reading the latest journals in various languages and by traveling repeatedly to Europe to study under the foremost physicians there. He wrote fifty books, several of them large medical tomes. He founded a medical college. He performed countless operations, closing up the wounds so neatly that the "Kellogg scar" became a hallmark. He was constantly in demand for public lectures. He invented many types of treatment apparatus, several of them still in use around the world. And he developed scores of foods, the most famous of which, the cornflake, changed the breakfast habits of the nation and catapulted his brother Will (W. K. Kellogg) to great wealth after he took over its manufacture in 1906. The claim that the doctor invented peanut butter poses problems, especially since Indians in South America had long enjoyed a goober paste not very much different. But there's no doubt that Kellogg did his bit to promote its popularity just as peanuts were generally swinging into vogue in the United States. [14] And it also seems true that he coined the term "Granola," so widely used in the 1970s.
After the disastrous fire In February 1902 Dr. Kellogg rebuilt the sanitarium. Especially in the 1910s and 1920s it basked in warm public favor. President Coolidge, Henry Ford, Percy Grainger (the pianist), and Homer Rhodeheaver (the gospel song writer) were only a few of his illustrious guests. Admiral Byrd consulted Kellogg repeatedly about the diet for his polar explorers. Many other notables came frequently, some annually.
You see, although the Battle Creek Sanitarium did expert surgery and included a large hospital for acute patients, it was most famous as a place where people came to lose weight, rest their nerves, and get generally toned up. The atmosphere in the sanitarium proper was more that of a hotel than of a hospital.
Dressed (in his later years) in a smart white suit, white shirt, white tie, white socks, and white shoes, the doctor gathered a crowd in the sanitarium parlor every week to deliver an entertaining lecture on the latest in medical progress. A primary purpose of medical missionary work was to teach people how to stay well.
In 1907 Dr. Kellogg broke with the church, a step he may have contemplated as early as 1890. [15] There were several factors. Natural differences with denominational leadership over administrative policies had been unfortunately aggravated by the reluctance of some ministers to practice certain features of health reform. Kellogg, not quite consistent with healthful principles himself, worked to the point of exhaustion (which for him took some doing), and this helped make him irritable.
Theology also played a part. The biblical concept that the body of the Christian is a "temple of the Holy Ghost" (1 Corinthians 6:19), he carried to extremes in a kind of pantheism that made God personally resident in every living thing, in animals, insects, and plants, and even identified God with gravity and sunshine. Such a position undermined the foundational Adventist doctrine of Christ in a heavenly sanctuary and laid a potential basis for fanaticism and immorality (on the basis that if God fills me, anything I want to do must be all right, a conclusion Kellogg himself never reached).
Kellogg toyed with his pantheistic ideas for a decade or more, earning several earnest motherly letters from Sister White. When he published his theory in The Living Temple (1903), a full break with the church became a matter of time.
More fundamentally, his severance from the denomination stemmed from his repudiation of Ellen White as the Lord's special messenger. He cherished her counsel as a young man and even lived for a while in her home. But as she warned him against pantheism, overwork, and excessive ambition, and urged him to pay close attention to the souls as well as the bodies of his patients, he veered farther and farther from her influence. Anyone reading her correspondence with him and her published appeals to ministers on his behalf knows how deeply his departure wounded her heart.
If Kellogg had stayed with the movement, how much more he might have done to tell its message to the world. Suppose, with his talent and influence, he had persuaded a Henry Ford or a President Coolidge to keep the Sabbath and adopt the advent hope!
With Kellogg's separation from the church imminent around 1903 and the use of his medical school no longer desirable, Ellen White, now in her middle seventies, set about launching a new medical school in southern California. She was also burdened for additional sanitariums in that area.
Kellogg had established a string of twenty-seven or more sanitariums around the world, a notable achievement. Typically, each one specialized in physical medicine (hydrotherapy, exercise, massage, etc.) in addition to offering where possible some general hospital-type medical care. California had only one Adventist sanitarium so far, located near Saint Helena in Napa County at Sanitarium (now Deer Park). Ellen White was emphatic that the new ones must be located outside major cities. "Build no sanitariums in the cities," she warned the General Conference of 1903. [16]
With the help of John A. Burden and other loyal supporters, she located a potential sanitarium building in Glendale, a village a few miles away from Los Angeles. Other suitable buildings were discovered in National City, a few miles south of San Diego, and in Loma Linda, a little distance from each of the three cities of Riverside, Redlands, and San Bernardino. As they prayed, prices on these properties tumbled downward. The Lord's aged messenger persuaded reluctant brethren to approve their purchase. The needed contributions came in--once from clear across the country on the very day when the mortgage would otherwise have been foreclosed. The whole experience is a saga in itself.
As for the new medical college, Ellen White wrote to the brethren that the Lord wanted an institution whose graduates could pass any appropriate examination in the land. And so amid the hills and orange groves at Loma Linda the College of Medical Evangelists came to birth, its first cry one of faith, its first breath a prayer. Today the original organization is represented by the schools of nursing and medicine at Loma Linda University, to which have been added in the meantime schools of dentistry, public health, and others.
In 1975 Seventh-day Adventists opened a second medical school in Montemorelos, Mexico.
In the 1970s, to help make people happy, healthy, and holy, Seventh-day Adventists operate two multi-million dollar medical colleges, a cordon of health-food factories, a small fleet of medical launches, an airborne fleet of medical-relief planes, and a worldwide network of more than three hundred hospitals and clinics. A fellowship of thousands of physicians, dentists, nurses, and other health-care personnel make it all possible--not to speak of managers, treasurers, engineers, secretaries, and custodians. The denomination as a whole, now over two and a half million strong, cherishes the concept of physical fitness as a spiritual privilege and the practice of "medical missionary work" as a religious responsibility.
Who would have thought that so much would burgeon from an idea that first emerged on a Friday evening in June 1863 in an unpretentious farmhouse a few country miles west of Otsego, Michigan?
Or from a "Christmas present" opened with tears by a fasting, suffering prayer band in Rochester in 1865?
Notes: