In The Kelloggs, medical historian Howard Markel thoroughly investigates the contributions and fraught relationship of Dr. John Harvey Kellogg and Will Keith Kellogg. Markel explores the lives and work of the two brothers and a host of supporting characters. He investigates the brothers’ innovations, including Dr. Kellogg's famous health retreat, the Battle Creek Sanitarium, and Will Kellogg's enormously successful eponymous cereal company. Markel also situates the brothers’ creations in their social context. He aims to use the story of the Kellogg brothers’ careers and disputes to “view vast changes in social mores, belief systems, lifestyles, diets, health, science, medicine, public health, philanthropy, education, business, mass advertising, and food manufacturing” in the United States from the Civil War to World War II (p. xxix).
Markel marshals numerous secondary and primary sources to offer an intricate historical biography. Alongside archival and scholarly research, Markel derives many of his stories from authorized biographies and earlier works about the breakfast cereal industry. Those who have read Brian C. Wilson's Dr. John Harvey Kellogg and the Religion of Biologic Living (2014) and Adam Shprintzen's Vegetarian Crusade: The Rise of an American Reform Movement, 1817–1921 (2013) will find some familiar information about Dr. Kellogg. Yet Markel gives the doctor a different context than do these other works by supplying more medical history, akin to Wilson's and Shprintzen's respective attention to religion and vegetarian politics. Markel also shows how Dr. Kellogg was influenced by relationships with family members, especially his brother Will. In Markel's depiction, the Kellogg brothers’ feuds take place amid the development of the Battle Creek Sanitarium and growth of the fantastically profitable business of Corn Flakes, influencing and taking advantage of major changes in business, medicine, manufacturing, and eugenic theories.
Markel's book is meant for a broad audience, using narrative history to explain complex trends. In addition to anecdotes, Markel vividly details the hardships of the frontier, routines at the Battle Creek Sanitarium, and the consequences of Americans’ rich diets. Markel supplements this specific description with historical context about business methods and religious movements; as a distinguished medical historian, his insights into the changing methods and reputation of the medical establishment are especially helpful. Business historians will appreciate the links here between changes in religion and health care positioned alongside the story of scientific management and large-scale advertising.
At times, it would be helpful to have Markel more firmly guide the reader. The historian's adjudication of disagreements and inconsistencies in primary sources is crucial. In cases such as the conflicting origin stories of Corn Flakes or a probing chapter on John Harvey Kellogg's advancement of eugenics, Markel offers such judgments to good effect. In other moments, however, Markel seems to relay the admiration of his subjects found in his sources, which by necessity include accounts from Kellogg family members and colleagues, as well as authorized biographers. Markel refers to “Will Kellogg's genius” and an advertising manager's “perfect ear for an effective sales pitch” (pp. xxv, 244). He writes that, “corporate paternalism aside,” Will Kellogg paid “good wages . . . but demanded honesty, integrity, hard work, and accountability” (p. 263). Markel repeats without citation the Kelloggs’ frequent but contested charge that C. W. Post—a cereal manufacturer who made millions from a grain-based coffee substitute and the breakfast cereal Grape-Nuts years before the advent of mass-marketed toasted corn flakes—stole his cereal recipes from the Sanitarium. Markel also depicts John Harvey Kellogg's courtship of a subordinate at the Sanitarium as a workplace meet-cute, writing that Ella Eaton formed a “bond with the dashing young physician [John Kellogg], especially after John asked her to join the Sanitarium's staff. For Ella, it turned out to be far more than a professional offer” (p. 127). More of Markel's authoritative analysis in such moments would help readers separate the history of the Kelloggs from the brothers’ own sense of both grandeur and victimhood, perpetuated by their allies.
Markel writes in a casual, familiar tone. He refers to many characters by first name, beyond the need to distinguish among the many Kelloggs. Dr. Charles Mayo, of Mayo Clinic fame, is here “Dr. Charlie” (p. 200). Markel also provides a great deal of narrative color, some of it off-color. He tells readers that the conductor of the New York Philharmonic was a “committed alcoholic . . . well into his cups . . . [who] woozily lifted his baton” (p. 70). Markel describes the “always sultry Marlene Dietrich” and explains Mapl-Flakes as a cereal “impregnated with loads of maple syrup” (pp. 339, 137). This prose style sometimes distracts from Markel's rich research and from his scholarly insights into the lives of two of the most important people in American medical and business history.
Markel's case for the importance of the Kellogg brothers to modern health, science, and business is vividly laid out. The book should prove of interest to business historians interested in the medical context of important innovations and to those who want to understand the personal struggles and psychological toll behind familiar stories of social transformation between the 1860s and World War II.
