Article content “Oh, you won’t be drinking it,” crooned Anthony Hopkins as Dr. John Harvey Kellogg in the 1994 film The Road to Wellville. The movie takes viewers back to the late 19th century and tells the story of the Battle Creek Sanitarium, America’s largest ever “wellness institute,” where Kellogg catered to the needs of the rich and famous with a plethora of unusual treatments.
The likes of Thomas Edison, Henry Ford and Mary Todd Lincoln came to “take the cure.” They sat in a lightbox, ate a vegetarian diet, exercised and listened to Kellogg’s lectures about the evils of sexual activity. But mostly they were subjected to hydrotherapy.
They sat in hot and cold baths, were hosed with cold water, and braved being wrapped in wet sheets. For the “tour de force,” they endured water jetted into their colon, since Kellogg believed that to be the part of the anatomy where all disease begins. A thorough cleansing would put patients on the path to health! Sometimes Kellogg determined that a more advanced form of therapy was needed and called for his enema machine to be loaded with yogurt instead of water.
Hence his remark above to the patient who stated his dislike for yogurt upon hearing Kellogg give instructions to an attendant to “bring in the yogurt.” Actually, the yogurt treatment was not total nonsense. Kellogg was a devotee of Ilya Metchnikoff, the Russian Nobel Prize winner who had advocated for the use of lactic acid bacteria, as found in yogurt,.