Behind the Bastards - Part Two: Kellogg: The Great American Cum Doctor

Episode Date: April 8, 2021

Robert is joined again by Miles Gray to continue to discuss John Harvey Kellogg. Learn more about your ad-choices at https://www.iheartpodcastnetwork.comSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

That is how we're starting the episode. Miles is coughing up the marijuana he just smoked. I mean, look, life stuff, man. It's fucking rough. We're recording this on a Monday, which we never do. This is why. This opening is why we don't record on Mondays. Oh, sorry.

I woke up at one, got out of bed at two, and then ran in my armor for an hour to wake my body up and have done nothing productive except you look wonderful. Open a podcast. Thank you. I feel great since I got to run. Must be nice. Yeah. You have like an exerciser's glow.

Mm hmm. Yeah. I don't know if that's the word. That's that's exactly what you're supposed to say. You have a colonizer's glow about you. Oh, thank. I could go for some colonizing miles. Just like colonizer's glow.

I'm just going to throw some names out there. El Salvador. That seems like a place that hasn't been colonized. Well, yeah, spoiler. Well, nevermind. I'm like, I'm like, I don't want to look it up and find out how horrible that is. We've talked about El Salvador in our in our school of the Americas episode. All the death squads we've backed there.

Yeah. And then we're confused about MS 13, huh? Which started in the United States. Right. It's all good. It's like, huh? It's all good shit. You know what else is good shit, Miles?

James Harvey. John Harvey Kellogg. Which one was he? James? Jesus. It's Monday. John Harvey Kellogg. I'd say John Harvey Kytel.

Yeah. I didn't know where you were going there, to be honest. I forgot your name. I wrote, I wrote a Harvey Kytel episode, but Sophie said 336 pages was too long for a podcast script. Oh my God. It was almost as long as the Will Wheaton script she won't let me read. That's not accurate.

You can read that. Whatever I ever told you, you can't. Sorry. Legal told us I can't do the Will Wheaton script because there's no evidence that he was the son of Sam Killer. The internet's most favorite child. Speaking of children, you know who was terrible with children? Hmm.

John Harvey Kellogg. Why'd I fall for that? America's Great Come Doctor. Sophie, can we have the title of these episodes be America's Great Come Doctor? I mean, if it's what your heart desires, I've never stopped you. Magna Come Doctor. Magna Come Doctor. Magna Come Loud?

No. No. Okay. So let's, let's, let's, I actually scripted the start of this being, let's start this episode by talking a whole lot about masturbation and I guess we got an early start on that. Yeah, we're depraved. We're depraved. I think most people would agree that masturbating is among, with some exceptions, is among the

least problematic things that you can do as long as you're private about it. It's low carbon. It's available to people regardless of their income level and it brings with it a whole bunch of health benefits, you know, people with penises who masturbate regularly have lower risks of a variety of cancers, people with vaginas who masturbate regularly often find climaxing makes sex easier. Everyone who masturbates can benefit from pain relief, better sleep, lower levels of cortisol.

It's pretty much a win-win is what I'm saying. I'm really glad you said privately because Louis C.K. jerked off. Yes. I was, I was thinking about Louis C.K. when I wrote that paragraph and made certain to insert privately into a plant, into an innocent plant in front of innocent people. No, no. If you go ahead and say, if you're private about it, it's fine to come in plants.

No. Yeah, it's fine. They're plants. They don't know what's going on. They don't know what you're doing to them. It's like having sex when a cat's in the room. The cat doesn't understand. And if you're worried, scoop it out after.

That seems worse for some reason. Do you really care? You care that much? It's like, like you're going to bust on the soil, but then you're like, well, I don't want to fully find out. What is happening here? I think coming on a plant, it's like, it's like having sex in front of a cat or a dog when they're in like the room and it's like, yeah, they don't know what's going on.

It's not like fucking in front of a monkey. If you've ever fucked in front of a monkey, the monkeys know what's happening. I don't think you're right about that one. I think I'm right about that. I don't like eyes on me, even animal or otherwise. Well, my old roommate's dog used to hump along on the side. Oh, yeah. I mean, but that doesn't mean he knows what's happening.

That just means he knows the motion, but he was castrated at a young age. Shout out to the young legend, Roxie. That's the dog's name? Yeah. Wow. I once fucked in front of a couple of hundred monkeys and it was very clear that they were all well aware of what was happening. You're so weird.

I can't even. Yeah. What? It was in the jungle. Why are you like the... Oh, shit. It was in the jungle. Can we get...

Robert is now the alt, like Takate, like most interesting man in the world guy or Doseki's rather. Alt Dosekis. Yeah, you're Alt Dosekis. Alt Dosekis. I back that. Yeah. It's you just like hitting a 40 in an alleyway like the same setup and he's like, if you've

never fucked in front of 300 monkeys, have you ever even fucked? It might have been a few dozen. It's hard to tell in the jungle, but it was a lot of monkeys. I really wish the hunters could have seen Miles face when he did that bit. Just gave a nice cheers and a cocktail brow, you know? It's just... There's an energy to it. I feel like if Steel Reserve wanted to advertise with me, I could sell a lot of Steel Reserve.

That is... Oh yeah. Oh. Extra gravity. Uh-huh. 211, baby. Where's the 211 crew at? Steel Reserve.

When was the last time you vomited on another person? Steel Reserve. 211. Also armed robbery. Uh-oh. Who knows? Whatever. Steel Reserve.

The perfect size for holding a six shooter in your other hand. Oh, look at us. Good times. Shout out to the California Penal Code. Yeah. Such a 211. So this was longer than I intended the introduction to be. But the point of it is that you have to work pretty hard to make masturbation be unhealthy.

And this is how people, I think, in general feel now because of overwhelming rigorous scientific data, showing that it's pretty good for you. But in John Harvey Kellogg's day, scientific consensus was lessed about what the hard data said and more about whatever a bunch of weird white dudes with sexual hang-ups figured was right. Kellogg was the latest in one of the biggest links in a chain that stretched back generations. Sylvester Graham and many of the other scientists of his day believed masturbation would lead inevitably to insanity if it continued long enough.

Kellogg agreed and extended the dangers of coming further to a breathtaking list of maladies. Here's how scholar Vern Bullog captured the different ailments Dr. Kellogg blamed on masturbation. Quote, General disability, consumption-like symptoms, premature and defective development, sudden changes in disposition, lassitude, sleeplessness, failure of mental capacity, fickleness, untrustworthiness, love of solitude, bashfulness, unnatural boldness, mock piety, being easily frightened, confusion of ideas, aversion to girls and boys, but a decided liking of boys and girls.

So I guess you like Tomboys too much if you masturbate all the time? Good shoulders, a weak back and stiffness of joints, paralysis of the lower extremities, a natural gait, bad posture in bed, lack of breast development in females, capricious appetite, fondness for a natural or hurtful or irritation articles such as salt, pepper, spices, vinegar, mustard, clay, slate pencils, plaster and chalk. You might like spices and chalk if you come too much. Oh my god. What is this list?

How convenient. This is weird shit. Disgusted simple food, use of tobacco, unnatural paleness, acne or pimples, biting of fingernails, shifty eyes, moist cold hands, palpitation of the heart, hysteria in females, chlorosis or green sickness, anemia, epileptic fits, bedwetting and use of obscene words and phrases. I will say that last one is accurate. People do cuss a lot when masturbating. I mean, who knows who would have thought a teenage with pimples might also be masturbating.

Yeah, there's a real correlation is not causation thing there. And actually, Miles, you've keyed in on how all of this nonsense really got going in the first place because scientists of the day didn't want to think that they weren't empiric basing their conclusions on like empiric reality even though they weren't and they found ways to convince themselves that observation backed up their fears about masturbation. Here's how it worked. 19th century physicians would observe patients in mental institutions and make a note of what behaviors they engaged in.

The idea was that whatever behavior unhealthy people engaged in must somehow cause that unhealthiness. Oh my God. And since the number one thing inmates and asylums did was masturbate, doctors concluded that masturbation caused insanity. What the fuck? I mean, it's not funny because. No, it's.

18th century, 19th century asylums were just unbelievable crimes against humanity. But God could work. How simple and we were calling these people fucking experts. These people we lock up in a room and never let out our masturbating. That must be why we locked them up. Damn it. And then what have you, the people that are always looking at them masturbating? Yeah, I don't think any of them ever analyze themselves a little bit.

But it wouldn't go there like apply that same logic path to anything else except for this one thing. Like they did, but like they did with like kids have pimples and kids masturbate. It must be a cause, you know. But everything. Yeah. Well, then also let's see. This kid's also, he walks funny.

All right. So weird gate and his posture is bad because he's a teen who's like awkward in their own body or they're awkward in their own body. And you know, just, but I love late the lazy science of this time. It's amazing. Just like it's so fucking ridiculous and unchallenged. It is. And based on this unbelievably shoddy data, like huge chunks of the scientific community

conclude that masturbation is not just bad for you, but a public health menace. And as a result, and since it was like a menace, doctors developed a variety of ways to treat it because obviously this is a life threatening problem. So almost anything is justified. Surgeons were applied to the hands or genitals of the masturbating youth to make touching their genitals painful. Stuff like icy hot basically, they would put like that on people's genitals to make it hurt to touch.

Some surgeons would actually put holes in a person's foreskin and insert a ring into it. Not unlike a Prince Albert, but in such a way that if you were to, if you were to get erect, it would stretch the, the foreskin painfully. Oh my God. Yeah. These are torture devices. What the, like the club for your foreskin?

Yeah, like the club for your foreskin. That is so fucked up and violent. Oh my. It's horrible. It's horrible. What? And did they have any like success stories that allowed them to go like, oh, this one knocked off the masturbating and now they're completely, they're, they're, they're, they're

much better now. We've seen market improvement. I would imagine the way a lot of the success stories work is that, right, you've got this kid who is, he has some sort of behavioral problem, right? He's not paying attention in school, he's, he's lashing out or something. He's doing something and you're blaming it on the masturbation. So you put a torture ring in his dick and he stops doing the thing that got him punished because you're torturing him, right?

And he doesn't want to be tortured. It's not because he stopped masturbating because masturbation wasn't causing the behavior, although he probably doesn't masturbate as much because you put a torture ring in his dick. But through the same kind of logic they were using earlier in the mental hospitals, people conclude this helps. Wow. It's great.

Close loop. Castration was ordered in the most severe cases, but circumcision was much more common. And in fact, in the United States, circumcision first gained purchase among Gentiles because it was believed, I mean, accurately that it would dead in sensation and thus reduce masturbation. So circumcision first became popular among like non-Jewish people in the United States because it was like an anti-masturbation treatment. Uh-huh. It's good shit.

How'd that go? How'd that go? Nobody's ever come, Miles. I don't know if you're aware of this, but it doesn't happen anymore. It's like, I want to get some more of that beef fat from earlier. I'm going to be right back. Are you guys still rendering that lard? So today, you know, as with today, like for every popular kind of health ailment boogeyman

even with like COVID-19, you know, there's the stuff the doctors actually prescribed for it, and then there's a whole bunch of like mom cures. You know what I'm talking about when I say mom cures? Yeah. Homespun remedies cooked up by parents. This is the case today with every kind of public health problem, and it was the case in the 1900s with masturbation as this section from a study in the Journal of Technology and Culture lays out, quote, some parents, however, preferred to develop methods of their own,

many of which were patented. American inventive genius quickly asserted itself through the development of a wide variety of gloves, guards, and other devices designed to make it more difficult for a child to master bait. Gloves, for example, were tied on children's hands as they went to bed, and parents were instructed to have their child sleep with the gloves on top of the blanket to make certain that there was not even gloved contact with the genital area. Gloves were also advised for mental patients and were widely used in mental institutions.

Specially designed bed cradles were manufactured in order to lift the bed clothes from the genital area so that the child would not rub against the blankets. Girls were discouraged from spreading their legs, and special hobbles were designed to prevent them from doing so. They hobbled young girls' legs to stop them from spreading them because it was thought that that would cause masturbation. Most ubiquitous, however, were the various harnesses designed to protect the genital area, usually patented under the term surgical devices.

The female harnesses usually had perforated wire-type meshings so that the girls could urinate through them and never touch themselves. All of these devices were fastened in the back, many with locks for which only the parents had the key. For males, there were similar devices, but most popular were sheaths with metal teeth that fitted over the penis. If the penis became erect, the teeth pierced the flesh and made any erection painful. Each new breakthrough in technology seemed to lead to a new kind of device.

Appliances that gave electric shocks, for example, came on the market after the development of batteries. From patent office records, I have been able to identify some 20 devices intended to prevent masturbation. 20 devices? Yeah. That's just the ones that got patented. How common would you say this was as a percentage of people?

No idea. It was obviously, this was a thing that wealthier parents did to wealthier kids more often than it was for the poor because it costs money to get these kind of medical treatments. It costs money to buy these kinds of devices. But it was not uncommon, I think is clear. The idea that even if these devices weren't the most common method of treating with it, punishing some sort of punishment, often involving physical pain for masturbation, I would say was the norm, like when it was caught because there was a very widespread idea that it was

harmful. Right. That makes so much sense. I think in really trying to look at the practical experience of how puritanical American society is and the aversion to sexuality is you have generations of people who were receiving punitive treatment, punishment, physical punishment for exploring their sexuality and how that just sort of keeps manifesting and iterating. Yeah.

It's pretty great. Pretty great. I mean, it's wild because some of the devices described you can now still find on sale but for a very different purpose. But I suspect that probably has something to do with it. A lot of weird kinks are born during this period because of the medical genital torture industry. It's good stuff, Miles.

It's good stuff. So thanks for having me. Thanks for being on here. It's going to get a lot worse as a heads up. I know. Yeah. This is the best it's going to be. So just say just say for the moment where we're just talking about a torture cage for

a penis. So John Harvey Kellogg, the reason I go through all this is to point out that he was not the origin point for the war on masturbation, nor was he the only prominent voice urging abusive treatments to discourage perfectly natural self-pleasuring. He was, however, the most prominent physician in the country by the early 1900s. The sanitarium was one of the most advanced and respected medical facilities in the nation. And since Dr. Kellogg was an experimenter, he experimented with new treatments for masturbation as well.

One of these treatments involved what he called skillful catheterization, using his considerable surgical abilities to insert a catheter up the urethra of the offending masturbator. Next, he would electrocute the catheter going up into their urethra, often while shooting water up into the urethra at the same time. To like make it more conductive? Yeah, I guess. Or just because he thinks shooting water into every hole is the solution to problems. It might not have been a torture.

That might just have been because like, well, if we add water, it'll make it better because water is the medicine that I prefer. Because we all know water and electricity. And a great cure. I mean, he's electrifying baths, so it's not a huge jump for the man. Jesus. But yeah, shoves a catheter up through your urethra and then shoots water and electricity up it.

Again. Which sounds like something the CIA would do. Right. Like, that's some Guantanamo shit. Is there any evidence, like, where are the writings on the success? You know, because I'm sure they probably had to manufacture stories to make it like... How could you just like blind? I'll talk about that in a bit.

But yeah, because it's okay. Because I'm just like, you know, this is just so fucked up. A big part of this is it is not quite universally accepted that this is bad health wise, but it was nearly universally accepted that it was morally wrong. So it wasn't just does it work. It was this needs to be punished. Right. So this is what you do.

It's just like parents beating their kids for thousands of years. Nobody... Like, there were... You could find a lot of different people writing about how healthy it is to hit your kid. Nobody was doing studies on it. There was an empirical evidence about the value of slapping your kid around, but they did it and they were certain that it helped. So I don't know.

Yeah. So this is just the... Are just the sickest urges coming out in this, you know, morally, quote unquote, justifiable way. Absolutely. So yeah, that was one of Kellogg's experimental therapies. And he would... When he would have people brought into his facility for chronic masturbation, they would

often be interned at the sanitarium for long periods of time where a variety of therapies would be tried on them. We talked last episode about his specific painfully uncomfortable bedding requirements to avoid stimulation. This was in part because Dr. Kellogg viewed comfortable, healthy sleep, the kind where you, you know, enter a rim cycle and dream as inherently dangerous. He declared in writing, in perfectly natural sleep, there are no dreams. Consciousness is entirely suspended.

And for some reason, that is one of the most frightening things I've ever read. It's like, if you're dreaming, you're unhealthy. Someone's dreaming. Someone's having weird dreams, aren't they? Yeah. Dr. John Kellogg is having some dreams that he does not like. Hey, if you're having dreams too, then you're just as fucked up based on this logic. Yeah.

That's why you want to make sure there's sleeping arrangements are as uncomfortable as possible so that nobody ever gets a good night's sleep. And did he practice what he preached? He did. He practiced what he, to the extent that we can verify, as far as we know, he practiced what he preached. Interesting. John Harvey didn't just think dreams were unhealthy.

He thought they were immoral. If a child or a woman with a masturbating problem claimed to be unable to control their dreams, he would call them a liar. Erotic dreams in Kellogg's understanding were choices, acts of deliberate defiance against morality and against the medical establishment. Dr. Kellogg also urged his patients to avoid consumption of, quote, sexually aggressive food. And here's a quote from Kellogg.

Tea and coffee have led thousands to perdition in this way. Candy, spices, cinnamon, cloves, peppermint, and all strong essences powerfully excite the genital organs and lead to the same result. You know how when you're drinking coffee and you just can't stop yourself from just pounding it? Yeah. Like a beached Omaha before the ground assault begins? He says cinnamon.

Mm-hmm. Motherfucker. Might as well call it CUM. CUM. What about your cereals? CUM. Oh, no. They didn't have spices in his day.

Remember, he broke up with his brother because his brother puts sugar in the cornflakes. That was part of why they didn't get along. Yeah. Wow. No, John Harvey. Yeah. I really appreciate that D-Day visual, too. Thank you.

Yes. It's exactly like that. I just picture someone furiously masturbating, like on a hedgehog on the beach. We're in CUM sector. Well, so, all right, here's the ads. Oh, we're back. We're back and we're all having a good, appropriate work day. Let's get back to talking about how this old man punished people for masturbating.

So it will probably not surprise you to hear that John Harvey Kellogg also forbade his patients from reading romantic literature, which in his mind was as deadly as any hard drug. Quote, storybooks, romances, love tales, and religious novels constitute the chief part of the reading matter which American young ladies greedily devour. We have known young ladies still in their teens who had read whole libraries of the most exciting novels. The taste for novel reading is like that for liquor or opium.

Wait, the whole, the fuck, okay. It's like Kellogg, he wants a world where nobody eats spices, everything is bland, nobody sleeps a full night's sleep, and people are tortured for masturbating, and if a girl reads a romance novel, she might become aware of the fact that it's possible to enjoy life, and that would be devastating to John Harvey Kellogg's worldview. What a fucking, he is just, it's just so ridiculous when that earlier quote when you said it would be like an act of, you know, you know, transgression against medical establishment, and he coupled that with morality, you know, just sort of this, you know, oh, they've been

ordained from fucking by God to be the enforcers of his law, however, as they see it through their fucked up lens. He believes that strongly, you know, he gets into medicine through the Seventh Day Adventist Church. Right. It's one and the same to him. Yeah. Dedicating him to God.

It's just like, what a fucking, that just shows you though, too, like I'm sure, you know, how, again, that's something else that reverberates in medicine culturally. Yeah. If this is, if this is part of, you know, like, I'm, I'm guessing this was the medical establishment, like quite literally. Oh, a lot of it. This is not universal. There are, as we talk about later, there's doctors, a lot, there's meta, like a not insignificant

amount of medical professionals in this period, even who disagree with these conclusions. But this is a fairly mainstream attitude in medicine. Yes. Yeah. Um, you know, John Harvey Kellogg is kind of like a Dr. Oz figure, but he is much more respected among mainstream doctors than Dr. Oz was, in part because he is actually an excellent surgeon. Right.

Like he is. Yeah. Um, so I found a lot of the quotes that I've read so far and a wonderful write up by Jezebel that'll be on the show notes that I really recommend reading. That article summarizes Dr. Kellogg's arguments against romance literature, thusly. The problem with this sort of reading, explained Kellogg, is that it takes a girl beyond the wholesome dreadfulness of her reality and transports her to a place that triggers passion. Passion's so great that some girls, quote, discovered the fatal secret themselves.

And the fatal secret is, of course, that it's, it's possible for women to orgasm. Oh my God, you don't, you don't want to learn in that. And it's here that I should note that John Harvey Kellogg bragged his entire life about never consummating his marriage. He was married for like 40 something years and would drag his entire life that he and his wife never fucked. I'm so sorry to her, but I have a feeling he was probably bad at sex. I think she might have dodged a bullet there to be honest.

Yeah. Yeah. I think so. She's like, oh, I'm, yeah. What is, how do you, like, you're like, oh, you know, I'm not, I didn't find dry for fucking ages, man. I didn't even consummate my marriage, baby, it's just, oh my God, they look like kidney stones.

I don't even get my dick wet when I take a bath, but a special copper submersible diving bell for my genitals. Oh God, what, I don't get paid enough to hear that John Harvey Kellogg's dick, but a genital diving bell. Yeah, a genital. That's very funny. I mean, I don't know. What do you even say to that?

This is, this is, like, the fact that you would brag about being married for 40 something years and never once fucking is, gives some, and the fact that he's a man who thought that dreaming was unhealthy, like both of those facts together, like, oh, you were profoundly damaged, just an incredibly unhealthy person. Yeah. It's unbelievable. And then again, like this, like his place in our culture and being so, like, just unwitting about the entire history about him, aside from just vaguely being like, like I said

in the beginning of like, yeah, dude, I know he was like, new masturbation and cornflakes. Yeah. No, no, it's, it's real bad. It's about to get real worse. So John Harvey Kellogg, if questioned on any of the things that I've read, any of his, like statements that I've read earlier, if questioned about any of this, would have defended himself by pointing out studies like the research into masturbating mental patients. He would have claimed accurately that the dangers of masturbation were widely agreed

upon by experts of his day, but most of his specific claims about how children were impacted by what he called the secret vice were not tied to any specific research. He was convinced for moral reasons that masturbation was a danger eclipsing almost anything else. There was no research to show that electrocution, uncomfortable beds and mental abuse actually stopped masturbation, but they punished the crime of self abuse and John Harvey looked no further than that in justifying his treatments. And again, you have to remember that this guy is like the pop doctor of his day. Parents listen to him.

Here is a checklist he published of different behaviors that in his mind were signs that a parent's child was secretly engaged in deadly masturbation. Bad Wedding quote, masturbation causes the entire genital area to become lax and undisciplined. Changes in behavior when a girl naturally joyous, happy, confiding and amiable becomes an unaccountably gloomy, sad, fretful, dissatisfied and unconfiding, be certain that masturbation is the cause for it will rarely be found to be anything other than solitary indulgence. He listed insomnia as a justification for suspicion of evil habits, trouble in school might also indicate masturbation, as Dr. Kellogg claimed it damaged children's memories and

their ability to focus. Masturbation caused lying, bashfulness and an unwillingness to meet the eyes of adults. The eye is a wonderful telltale of the secrets of the mind, he warned parents. Boldness, a child acting out in other words, was another sign of secret masturbation, as was fearfulness. Quote, easily frightened children are abundant among young masturbators. The victim's mind is constantly filled with vague forebodings of evil, he often looks behind him, looks into all the closets, peeps under the bed and is constantly expressing

fears of impending evil. Such movements are the result of a diseased imagination and they may justly give rise to suspicion. Another sign, is he a Miles? It's like, he's just listing everything a kid would possibly do, it's so fucked up and unfair. Yeah, it gets worse. Another sign, was unusual vaginal discharge or a stretched vaginal cavity in little girls.

Morse worrisome, Kellogg wrote, was seductive behavior from young female children. A forward or loose manner in company with little boys is suspicious conduct, especially in one who has previously shown no disposition of this short. Sort, girls addicted to this habit usually show an unnatural fondness for the society of little boys and not infrequently are guilty of the most wanton conduct. Now, you already noted, Miles, that a number of these symptoms of secret masturbation are just things kids do, but it gets worse than that, because as that Jezebel write-up notes, a lot of the things that Dr. Kellogg laid out as signs of masturbation are also today

commonly recognized signs that a child may be sexually abused. Oh my god. Yeah, buddy. Yeah. Jesus Christ. Here's Jezebel. Quote, the Delaware Department of Services for Children, Youth and Their Families gives a very succinct list of similar behaviors, which also include changes in behavior, inappropriate

sexual behaviors, changes in school performance, and vaginal discharge. Modern medicine and psychology identifies these conditions as potential signs of a child being sexually abused. The two lists match, almost word for word. Wow. Now, the thought that countless sex abuse victims were brought to Dr. Kellogg, child sex abuse victims were brought to Dr. Kellogg, and punished for masturbation is horrible enough, but it actually gets a lot worse than that.

A particularly dire case study would be one that Kellogg himself wrote out in his 1902 edition of Ladies' Guide to Health and Disease, a book he absolutely should not have written. He writes that a mother brought in her 10-year-old daughter to him for treatment. The young girl was a rape victim. Dr. Kellogg identifies her as such. He knew that she was a victim of sexual abuse, and he wrote, quote, her first instruction and by instruction, he means her first, like she first learned about sex by this guy who abused her, was received from a hoary-headed fiend in human shape who had enticed her to a secluded place and there

introduced her to all the nastiness which his depraved and sensual nature could devise. Now, so far, that's not horrible. He's putting the blame on the abuser, which is good. But the problem is that Kellogg didn't see this little girl's chief problem as the fact that she'd been abused and assaulted and robbed of agency over her own body. In his eyes, the problem was that she had been introduced to sexual sin, and that was going to make her masturbate. Oh, my God.

So, again, he gets brought a 10-year-old sex abuse victim, and his first concern is she might start masturbating. Yeah. Yeah. And like this just horrible feedback loop that's impossible. Like all roads just lead to this, no matter what, and there's no empathy or anything. And it's the thing where even if this person is a victim and being a victim leads them to this what he believes is an evil behavior, the solution is always some form of abuse

to stop the masturbation. He wrote, quote, a little girl, naturally bright and unusually attractive and intelligent, had become the victim of this soul and body-destroying habit which had brought on a serious, nervous disease and threatened to destroy both body and mind before she had reached the age of 10 years. So, you see what he's doing here. He's identifying that she's traumatized, but he's blaming it not on the assault, but on the fact that she's masturbating, that he assumes she's masturbating as a result

of the assault. Right. As a physician, Dr. Kellogg saw his job as not helping this girl with the trauma from her assault or even treating the physical symptoms of her rape. His job was to stop her from masturbating. In cases like these, he had a standard procedure. Step one was that the parents needed to catch their child in the act. The best way to do that, he believed, was to wait until a few minutes after the child

had gone to bed and sneak up on them, throw off their blankets and, quote, under some pretense, forcibly examine the child's genitalia for evidence of sexual excitement. So again, he's brought in a rape victim and he tells her parents what you need to do is assault her in the night. In the night. Yeah. Yeah. Hard to define a worse thing to do in that situation.

Yeah. And again, no, oh, it's presumed masturbating is the reason that they have or displaying trauma on top of or displaying their signs of their trauma on top of acknowledging but not under. It's just so vile. Yeah. It's really bad. And to know that, again, whatever, if this is the majority or whatever, that it's mainstream

enough that there are generations of parents that ingested this, like what the reverberations of that are in our culture and where we're at, like this is, yeah, these are the seeds of that. Yeah, you think about just how clearly fucked up both not just like the things revealed by me, too, but sort of the reaction to it and the lashing back against it, all of that. This is a part of that, right? Because a lot of the generations that created what are today sort of like the conservative moral code were raised in this stuff.

Their grandparents were raised in this stuff, right? And they passed some of that down like this is a piece of that horrible puzzle. It's pretty bad. Right. Back on the subject of inspecting kids to make sure they're not masturbating. For children with penises, this was as easy as looking for an erection. For children with vaginas, Kellogg wrote, quote, if the same course is pursued with girls under the same circumstances, the clitoris will be found congested with the other genital

organs, which will also be moist from increased secretion. So let's recap. His advice to the parents of a 10-year-old rape victim was to throw off her covers by surprise in the dead of night and forcefully inspect her vagina. His prescription for the parents of sex abuse victims was to abuse their children further. It's. Yeah. Like, well, again, what's the that?

What are you saying at that? But again, it's like, they don't care about evidence because this really isn't about no improving their lives. The real threat is. It's telling that like he's obviously disgusted at the rapist, but his real horror is that the the young girl might take some sort of agency over her body. That's the actual thing that he's he's frightened of, right? Or boys.

He didn't like boys taking age. He didn't believe people had. He believed like I think it was more like like your body belongs to God, right? It's the seventh day. I mean, it's not just the seventh day Adventists that believe this, but that's where he gets it. It's this idea that your body is not your own and it is my job as a physician to stop you from abusing it.

It's pretty bad. Yeah. And like what a morbid responsibility to think you have. Yes. Yeah. Pretty dark. And I should say that everything we've just outlined was the least invasive deterrent that John Harvey Kellogg suggested for the cases of masturbation.

The goal here was to shame these kids by embarrassing them. They didn't like that was that was the actual goal was that like if your parents catch you in the night, you will be ashamed and you won't do it anymore. He believed that what he one instance of what he called morally justified violation would deter most children. For those who soldiered on his prescription grew more severe, quote, bandaging the parts has been practiced with success, tying the hands is also successful in some cases. But this will not always succeed for they will often contrive to continue the habit

in other ways as by working the limbs or lying upon the abdomen, covering the organs with a cage has been practiced with entire success. Like many doctors of his era, Kellogg prescribed circumcision to his most severe patients. He was adamant that in these cases, pain killers should not be prescribed, quote, the operation should be performed by a surgeon with without administering an anesthetic is the brief pain attending the the operation will have a salutary effect upon the mind, especially if it be connected with the idea of punishment as it may well be in some cases. The soreness which continues for several weeks interrupts the practice.

And if it had not previously become too firmly fixed, it may be forgotten and not resumed. Jesus. So surgery with yeah, genital surgery without anesthesia is your punishment for masturbating. We are now in the territory of like, I think some CIA guys would be like, whoa, hold on. Someone get the Geneva Convention really quick. We've never read it, but I'm pretty sure this is definitely is over. Over the line. Huh?

Yeah. Damn. Yeah. Yeah. So and I'm just thinking again, how they accepted that kind of treatment is and like how the pattern of inflict as much pain as possible to solve the problem. Yep. Still exists to this day.

It sure does. Myles. Thematically, you know what I mean? Yeah. Yeah. It sure does. Mary was also prescribed for little girls, and I'm not going to prevaricate here. The surgical option was what we now call female genital mutilation.

They did not call it that then. They called it the severing of the clitoris and the labia menorah Kellogg himself wrote in one of his case studies, quote, a little girl about 10 years of age was brought to us by her father who came with his daughter with his daughter to have her broken of the vile habit of self abuse into which she had fallen. Having read an early copy of this work, the father had speedily detected the habit and had adopted every measure which he could devise to break his child of the destructive vice which she had acquired.

But in vain, it finally became necessary to resort to a surgical operation by which it is hoped that she was permanently cured as we have heard nothing to the contrary since and since and as the remedy seemed to be effectual. So that is a father who is a fan of Kellogg's books, reads them and becomes obsessed with the idea that his daughter might be masturbating, become convinced that she is masturbating, that he can't stop her. And after repeatedly assaulting her in the night, takes her to Dr. Kellogg to have her genitals mutilated.

That's what happened in that case study. And that's a success. That is a success. And one of the good things that the Jezebel article notes is that as you can tell from that like in that write up, Dr. Kellogg doesn't check in on the child. He says it is hoped she was permanently cured because we haven't heard anything to the contrary since. Oh, my evidence is right.

Yeah. He doesn't check in. He doesn't be like, yeah, it looks like back in after four or five weeks after this surgery to see if it did anything. Like he doesn't do a follow up. Fucking horrific, man. It is. It's butchery.

Yeah. And it's he's treating it like it's some kind of tumor. Mm hmm. It's like, yeah, I know. Just do that. And then don't worry about it. Like that's that's the problem. That should do it.

Yeah. That'll that'll take care of it. Yeah. It's not. Again, it's not like you're saying it's butchery. Well, there's nothing. There's nothing restorative or helpful or healthy. No.

About fucking any of it. No. And it's because it's it's not really based in science. It's based in morality. He doesn't need to study how his patients do in the long term when he does stuff like this because he knows he's right. It would be a waste of time to confirm it. Many doctors in Kellogg's era prescribed female genital mutilation as a treatment for masturbation.

But Kellogg pioneered another treatment. The application of carboleic acid to the sensitive parts of the sexual organs in order to burn them badly enough that all sensation was permanently dead. Jesus Christ. I know this this is the this is in some ways maybe the worst one since Georgia tan. Yeah. Yeah. It's bad.

It's real fucking bad. Didn't we do Georgia tan with Sophia? We did. We're just scarring for 20 day fiance left and right here. Yeah. We're going to break them down. Yeah. Please associate my stoner reality podcast with this check the show out.

Nothing like being high and watching TV like profoundly abusive practices towards probably tens of thousands of children. You think that's that's the number. I mean not just talking Kellogg here when I I don't I really have no idea. But it was it was he was not the only doctor doing this right like and will because this was you didn't want to talk about sex. Well we'll never know how many little girls in this period in the United States were mutilated in this way.

Right. Here's some ads. We're back. We're back. Now I have noted that Kellogg was not alone in using female genital mutilation as a treatment for masturbation here. But I should also note that a huge number of medical professionals railed against the practice and that even in Kellogg's day a significant amount of legitimate documented scientific

literature pointed to it being a wildly harmful procedure. This was not uncommon. It was also not universally agreed upon as healthy in 1868 when John Harvey was just 15 a gynecologist named Charles rest wrote a book called lectures on the diseases of women. In it he recalled the story of a 53 year old woman who went to a surgeon for anal fissures. The surgeon in this case without getting her permission or asking at all also removed her clitoris.

West in 1868 a male gynecologist condemned this behavior and wrote it will I imagine scarcely be contended that proceedings which we should reprobate if practiced on the one sex changed their character when perpetrated on the other. And he's saying if they'd cut a guy's dick off. Right. You wouldn't be OK with this. Why is it OK when it's a clitoris. So there were people who recognized there were a lot of doctors who recognized how horrible

this was. It was not just a sign of the times. You know. Right. I mean like so what was it take like did the general public need doctors like that to like even stimulate that kind of thinking for them to be like yeah hold on maybe that is bad or do you think there were people who I'm sure they were hearing that were also like what the fuck I'm sure there were I'm sure there were plenty of even like poor illiterate dudes

who were like I'm not going to let you cut my my my kids up like fuck you like stay the hell away. Yeah. I'm certain that happened. But obviously those people aren't writing books and those people aren't giving lectures at major medical schools like John Harvey Kellogg you know. John Harvey Kellogg kept up his devotion to clitorectomies his entire medical career. Even after 1912 when mainstream medical textbooks began to condemn the practice is not just

completely ineffective but liable to cause the kind of mental health problems that James Harvey Kellogg blamed on masturbation. The fact that he was wrong about a great deal of very important things had no negative impact on John Harvey's sanitarium. This was unfortunately due partly to the fact that he was right about an awful lot. Kellogg was a major early proponent of exercise which at the time was not widely recognized as beneficial. He was also way ahead of the curve on gut bacteria.

Medical scientists are only really now starting to get a handle on how important gut bacteria are to your overall health but in the late 1800s and early 1900s Dr. John Harvey Kellogg understood you know how big a deal it was. He partnered with Henri to say I'm probably some guy some French fucking guy a scientist at the Pasteur Laboratory in France and together they would study acidophilus proving he understood how to do actual rigorous empirical science when he wanted to Kellogg and his partner found that people whose guts had acidophilus suffered far fewer digestive diseases than people who did not.

So he was capable of doing science. Yeah, in that very strict way though. Yeah. All right. If all these people got it then that's that means that you know what I mean. If they're all masturbating then that's a that's a sign that's all I need and then you know it's like the clock is broken clocks right in there. Kellogg became a huge advocate of yogurt's health benefits.

He became rightfully convinced that the bacteria in yogurt protected against disease and believed those bacteria quote should be planted where they are most needed and may render the most effective service. This of course meant eating yogurt but that isn't all it meant Miles. And you know the guy this was right you know what he's this he's going to put it up their butts. Enemies. Yep.

Yeah. Yeah. Kellogg had been convinced for years that auto intoxication which we discussed last episode was behind behind all bowel disease. Once he realized that yogurt could populate the gut with good bacteria he saw yogurt as a cure for auto intoxication and the best way of administering it would be via enema. He would use his enema machine for this whole court courts of water first and then gigantic quantities of yogurt up the ass second.

Wow. And I mean at least he had evidence that was there's a lot more evidence that shooting yogurt up your ass is good than anything. Yeah. Than anything he's ever done in his life. But that's where we're at with this fucking guy and his patented machine obviously because that did shooting stuff up his own ass machine which absolutely wasn't a kink. No not at all.

And this is custom custom machinery or not maybe just repurposed industrial machinery. Yeah. The machine that he designed to shoot yogurt up his own ass because he started every single day with a regular enema and a yogurt enema. If you're like expensive I mean it was really good waste of he runs the enema company you know. I know but I mean like. How much yogurt are you going through a day there.

I think less than the water. Right. I mean like yeah gallons of yogurt. I mean maybe that's a flex if you're saying like I'm rich enough that I can shoot gallons of yogurt up my ass every day. I literally do a half barrel a day. Yeah as a rule if you're ever wondering what Dr. James John Harvey Kellogg was getting up to on a specific day in history you would be safe in guessing shooting a variety of liquids

up his own ass. That problems were at least as big a part of the sanitarium's treatments as abuse of sexual procedures. McGill University writes quote there were other options for those who didn't see the appeal of being pumped full of yogurt through their rear portals. The sands mechanotherapy department had come up with the vibratory chair. This was a spring loaded device that shook the patient violently to stimulate intestinal peristalsis.

Once the toxins had been dislodged in this fashion headaches and back aches would disappear and according to Kellogg the body would be filled with a healthy dose of oxygen and the sands coffers would be filled with a heavy dose of money. The san off also offered a variety of baths cold hot and electrified. If this did not shock the disease out of the unfortunate victim then Dr. Kellogg resorted to surgery removing the offending part of the intestine. Kellogg carried out over 22,000 such operations during his career with a remarkably low complication rate.

It was probably not necessary procedures but at least he was good at it. Jesus. Shake them. Shake the shit out of them. And what was that based off of? People who were sitting and did a lot of off-road bugging were really healthy because they were just had the rockiest seat in town. What the fuck is that?

I have no idea what that one was based on. They were just trying shit past a certain point, you know? Right. Like fuck it. John Harvey Kellogg's pioneering work played a major role in popularizing yogurt within the western diet. He was also one of the first major advocates of soy milk which he found was an even better way to propagate acidophilus than yogurt.

And this brings us to Dr. Kellogg's most famous and popular contribution to mankind. Breakfast. John Harvey Kellogg had a brother, Will Keith, who for a time worked with him at the sanitarium. After the two spent years developing foods meant to replace meat in the diet, he created a number of different nut butters, experimented with soy, and looked for more ways to work whole grains into the American diet. Dr. Kellogg was a big fan of Zwaibak, a twice-baked biscuit that he felt helped people purge toxins. But Zwaibak was so hard that, at one point, an elderly patient at the sanitarium broke

her dentures on it and threatened to sue him if he didn't pay for them. John Harvey didn't want to pay for more old people's dentures, so he and his brother, Will, set to work developing a way to pound grain and fiber into their patients without damaging their teeth. Through an incredibly boring process of trial and error, they arrived at corn flakes. McGill writes, quote, John Harvey was only interested in the health properties of the new products. Could these serve as an antidote to the passions stirred up by meat?

But Will was a businessman and was bent on commercialization. Now, I found a write-up on Encyclopedia.com that actually gives quite a good explanation of the fallout that resulted between John Harvey and his brother, Will, who seems like the only sort of decent member of the family. John Harvey absolutely comes out as the asshole in this relationship. Quote, Will, often known as W.K. Kellogg, never had a very good relationship with his older brother. According to Benjamin Klein Hunnicutt in Kellogg's Six-Hour Day, famous for his energy and untiring

work, John Harvey cultivated the image of a superman, dictating the secretaries for eight hours at a stretch, performing operations through the night, conspicuously working at meals and on trains. John Harvey expected W.K. to live up to this myth and berated him for being lazy if he stole some time at home. When Post began making millions of dollars through aggressive advertising and free giveaways, W.K. wanted to develop a similar large-scale advertising campaign. When his elder brother said no, W.K. began looking for ways to take control of the company.

Because of his notorious frugality, John Harvey had convinced employees to accept lower pay along with stock in the cereal business, now known as the Kellogg Toasted Cornflake Company. W.K. secured financing from a wealthy St. Louis insurance broker and quietly began buying stock. By 1906, he controlled the company. So they make a cereal company together, but Will does not get along with his brother. He's just shaming him constantly for like having a life outside of making cereal. Oh, I heard you used pepper the other day, you sick fuck.

Well, and Will is seeing like other cereal companies have started to develop at this point and Will is seeing them advertise and seeing them add sugar and he's like, we can make more money if we do this. And John Harvey Kellogg is like, no, it's about keeping people boring. And yeah, so Will buys up the company in secret and takes it over from his brother. The break between John and W.K. came in part because Will wanted to add sugar to cornflakes so human beings would enjoy it. John Harvey thought sugar would make people come and he violently opposed the idea.

It is hard to overstate what a huge deal cornflakes were for society. I found an NPR interview with an author who wrote a book about the Kellogg brothers, a guy named Markel, and he does a good job of explaining just why this was revolutionary. Quote, making breakfast was an ordeal. So even if you made porridge or mush, these whole grains took hours to melt down and then make into a mush or a soft form. And so these poor mothers were getting up very early and they were probably taking care of their children all night.

They had to start a wood burning fire. And so making breakfast was a great ordeal. But John Harvey Kellogg invented them for the involuted people who came to his Battle Creek Sanitarium. It was his little brother, Will, who realized, you know, there are a lot more people who are healthy and just want a convenient, tasty snack than those who are ill and need an easily digestible breakfast. So he added a little sugar, a little salt to cornflakes, and it just took the world

by storm in 1906 because you could simply pour breakfast out of a box. Even dad could make breakfast now. Even dad who's busy suspecting you of jerking off. Yeah, even dad who's tired from breaking into your room at night, who doesn't know how to break his own cycles of abuse and mistreatment can even make breakfast. At least pour some cornflakes. Jesus. But yeah.

Holy shit. Yeah. That's so fucking wild, you know. It's something like that just creates all this cover for the name now. It's amazing. I don't know if anyone else we've ever covered with this incredible mix of outrageous harm done to society and also helped create things every single person listening to this enjoys. Right.

Like no matter who you are, he either created or helped popularize something that you use regularly, that you ingest regularly. And that's like, you can't say that about Hitler. Yeah. Like overall, right? It doesn't matter. Like it's the brand is just at a certain point, it's just a brand. And then you look back and you're like, I don't know, Kelly, genital mutilation?

No. That's cereal. They're cereal. No. They're not cutting up people. Because there's even like that movie, The Road to Wellville. Yeah. I don't know if you know that.

Yeah. In the 90s. Yeah. That's like such a... Like I remember thinking... They left that part out, didn't they? Yeah. They left a lot of part out.

Yeah. That whole fucking thing where... Really weird. They didn't include him abusing children. Yeah. Yeah. It's just... But yeah.

But that's... I think, yeah, we just have this blind spot for certain shit at times or maybe they did see him. We can't do that. It doesn't matter because nobody knows about podcasts yet where someone will take the time to research this. And it's... You know, it's fucking...

It wasn't easy to research this. It's not easy to read it to you. Nobody on the call was having a good time during the portion of the episode. I expect a decent number of listeners for perfectly reasonable reason will be like, I can't... I can't do this, you know? Listen to that. Yeah.

Of course it's horrifying. I can't do this. Whereas a funny video of... A funny movie about cereal, man. Right. Nobody has an issue with that. Right. And thus, things get whitewashed and it has, you know, modern consequences.

Right now, there's a bunch of bills being debated and I think some even being passed that will allow doctors to, like, act with their conscience and refuse to treat LGBT people. And it's the same thing. The idea that medicine and morality can be tied. They shouldn't be. Exactly. Like, morality in medicine means doing your best to alleviate and treat the symptoms and

illnesses of your patients. Right. Like, morality in medicine means nothing more than doing your best to ensure the health of the people who come to you for treatment. Your personal opinion shouldn't fucking matter. Yeah. That's what being a doctor is. Well, but sometimes you're like, oh, I'm a monster that needs to use the occupation

of doctors. Oh, I'm garbage, actually. Yeah. Oh, I'm a monster. I'm just smart and I'm so cunning that I realize this is the profession I need to get in proximity of people to do what I do. I think when that guy wrote, first do no harm, what he meant was cut up little boys and girls. Right.

Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. And again, reverberations just in our culture, you know, it's like everywhere, this same mentality of punishing for getting close to being liberated or understanding something or something that's counter to what has been biblically preached and how that leads to just the absolute dehumanization of people. And like, we're still, it echoes in the same way as like, you know, slavery does in certain

ways, just white supremacy that if your medicine is, was entrenched in religion like this on some level, that's not going to still be, you know, part of the culture we're having a reckoning with. Yep. But I mean, yogurt, yeah, yogurt's pretty rare. Honestly, I need to know how much and if there was like, if he was he, was he cutting the yogurt? He's telling me it's pure yogurt, but was he cutting that shit?

You know, was he pouring in some cocaine with the yogurt to wear? Hey, doc, I heard you're stepping on my yogurt with buttermilk. So yeah, there were a number of other significant positive developments that Dr. Kellogg and his sanitarium played a major role in. They were probably the first major business to make calorie counts and nutrition facts available for all of the meals they served. This would be decades before the practice was mandated in the United States. John Harvey was also a philanthropist.

In 1893, he decided to expand his operation into Chicago. The city police chief advised him to set up his new sanitarium and quote, the dirtiest and wickedest place in the city. So he built it in a slum that was heavily populated by impoverished black people. But the satellite facility included a free pharmacy and clinic, free baths, free laundry, an evening school for Chinese language students and a visiting nurses service. His cafeteria offered a penny lunch service and fed an estimated 500 to 600 people a day. So it wasn't all mutilation, you know?

Free clinics are good. Well, I don't know. His free clinic is a mixed bag. Free laundry is good. Right. I'm sure he had very evolved ideas on biracial or race mixing. We're getting there. Yeah, I was going to say.

I can only imagine what this fucking guy is doing, being like, I'm going to service this community. We're getting there, buddy. The success of the sanitarium swelled Dr. Kellogg's ego and led to conflicts with his church. By some accounts, his break with Ellen White and the Seventh Day Adventist Faith started when he caught Sister White eating a piece of fried chicken. The conflicts between the two of them went on for years and are more complex that I can easily summarize.

But a lot of it has to do with Kellogg's occasional embrace of the scientific method. The bottom line is that he allowed his scientific beliefs to sometimes contradict the teachings of his prophet. He was accused of blasphemy and disfellowshipped in 1907. One of the beliefs that got Kellogg in trouble was a partial acceptance of evolutionary theory. Unfortunately for everyone, John Harvey's embrace of evolution was mainly a corollary to his embrace of eugenics. From a wonderful and comprehensive write-up in Dr. Kellogg's own local paper, the Battlecreek

Enquirer, quote, Kellogg's support of eugenics was tepid to begin with, likely due to eugenics' ties to Darwinism and his connection to the Seventh Day Adventist Church, which teaches a literal interpretation of the sixth day creation story in Genesis. It wasn't until his break from the church in 1907 that he began to truly embrace the ideas. Kellogg combined his belief in eugenics, the improvement of human functioning by improvement of living conditions, to come up with his own brand of eugenics he referred to as race

betterment. The things he had advocated, avoiding through his biologic living, meat and alcohol, were deemed race poisons. That's some Nazi shit, yeah. Race betterment. Race poisons. Race betterment. Race poisons.

What? Of course. Yeah. That's what the fuck is. You know what I mean? Like, it's so, honestly, I'll let you go on. But I wonder deep down, we would have been fine if this motherfucker died. We would have been absolutely wonderful if this motherfucker died.

Somebody was going to give us cereal. He figured out the acidophilus shit with some other dude. Yeah. You know what I mean? The CIA would have figured that out with that. Yeah. We didn't need him. You know what?

This is such, like, you know, fuck, you know, you're not special, you sick fuck. It's getting into the fact that he basically created the cultural space for guys like Dr. Fellin, Dr. Oz, too, the celebrity doctors. He's a big part of that as well, you know? Not the only part of it. All bad. All bad. All bad.

Race betterment. Race betterment. Race poisons. Race poisons. Oh, thank you. White savior, please. Oh, yeah, baby. Tell the save these people.

Now, yeah, it's interesting that that last line I just read was basically word for word Nazi propaganda because Dr. Kellogg was not a Nazi. Now, the precise nature of his racism is fascinating to puzzle out. He is a... We can talk a bit about the kind of racist that he is. He's an interesting kind of racist. I would say that. Kind of racist.

Yeah. The fuck is... Yeah. Dr. Brian Wilson, who wrote the book that was a major source for Part One, seems to have framed his bigotry as a natural evolution of his theories on biologic living. He saw selective breeding as the same thing as avoiding meat and masturbation. Quote, overall, Kellogg was worried about the ultimate fate of the human race. Kellogg believed, quote, if we continue on with our bad habits, we would eventually become

extinct potentially. So there was this larger issue of the human race. But if you drill down a little bit more in his public statements, it's pretty clear that he was really concerned about the white race. John Harvey agreed with Teddy Roosevelt that white people were committing race suicide by allowing inferior races into the country. These races included black and Asian people, but also people from the bad parts of Europe, like Italy.

In the 1910s, Kellogg melded a warning against race mixing into his theory of biologic living. The Battle Creek Enquirer notes that his beliefs on eugenics were often at odds with how he ran his business and personal life, which is part of why I think he's an interesting kind of racist. Quote, he rejected segregation of blacks at his sanitarium, where African-American doctors and nurses were trained. He and his wife, Ella Eaton, fostered more than 40 children, among them African-Americans and children from Latin America.

Kellogg took great care of Sojourner Truth during her visits to the sanitarium, reportedly grafting some of his own skin to her leg to treat an ulcer. And he personally invited Booker T. Washington to visit as a guest in 1910. So again... That's not how... Do we have receipts on that skin graph? I have no idea. That's some pre-international, you could be like, you know, I get some skin to Sojourner

Truth, so I'm not a racist. I literally put my skin on her. I took my skin and donated it. I mean, the point when I say he's not a Nazi isn't to like, whitewash him at all. It's to say that like, you can be extremely racist and not be a Nazi. Like Teddy Roosevelt, not a Nazi, monster. You know? It's just because it's not, because the hate is warped in this weird, you know, betterment

exactly. Oh no, I'm not saying, I'm saying, it's racist that I'm saying you're flawed to begin with. And then what I'm saying is I'm hopeful for you, degenerate human. We can make your race better, not as good at white people, but better as opposed to the Nazis who say we should exterminate your race. I mean, if you guys would stay off that race poison, and I think that's what that other facility is for, even though he's running it, he's observing and collecting data. And I'm sure that's for him.

It's not really, it says nothing charitable about it. Like there's clearly something that, yes, he'll be like, well, it's fine outwardly that it's a help, but really I'm here to make observations that reinforce my racist worldview. Yes. Yes. Yeah. It's one of those things. Yes.

He was a monstrous bigot. He wrote in 1902, quote, the intellectual inferiority of the Negro male to the European male is universally acknowledged. This guy who knew Booker T. Washington, who, you know what, you know, who Booker T. Washington was smarter than the guy who thought sleep was poison. Yeah. Right. Yeah.

Seriously. I mean, this is, but like it's also like the, you know, dawn of like this insidious sort of, you know, will later be like deracialized, concerned, troll racism. Yes. Yes. Because it's still the same thing, you know, at the end of the day, even though you're not espousing violence to begin with, when you start from there, the premise is violent. Yeah.

And that's where it's just like, come, like really though, the race betterment foundation. Come on. Yeah. The race betterment foundation. Yeah. Now under Kellogg and under his race betterment foundation, the sanitarium would actually play host to three international eugenics conferences at these Kellogg advocated for eugenics registry nationwide that could be used to establish what he called racial thoroughbreds.

He advised people to consult medical records to determine their racial makeup before getting married. And like all eugenicists, he supported the sterilization of defectives, including criminals. Under his advisement, the Michigan state legislature passed public act 34, which authorized the sterilization of, quote, defective persons. Under this law, at least 3,800 people were involuntarily sterilized. When I guess when that law was repealed, Miles? Probably not to like the last 30 years at a magazine.

1974. Right. Exactly. I guess we did better than you thought. Yeah. What the fuck? Yeah. Because it's so, I mean, again, that's another thing that look how long that fucking takes.

Like something that's so on its face, disgusting, that it's like, yeah, oh yeah, we should probably stop doing that. Yeah. But then also thinking of how like even, you know, women and especially women of color, the pain thresholds are not taken seriously by doctors. To this day. Yeah. And you think, oh wow, because we were fucking yipping with Dr. Cornfuck over here.

Dr. Cornfuck. I mean, I don't, I'm not enough, I'm not an expert on Dr. Kellogg. So I don't know if he ever, like, we talked a little earlier, he definitely thought that if you are giving someone like a surgery to stop masturbation, you shouldn't use pain medication because it's a healthy punishment. I wonder if maybe some of the belief that you don't need to give black people the same amount of painkillers was rooted in that idea, too. That idea of like, well, if they're unhealthy, it's their fault and we should correct them

by not. I have no idea. Or it's just a habit that becomes like culture, a cultural norm within medicine with no examination of what that actually means. Like this is why it takes people so long to fucking like stop for a second and look at your patterns and be like, oh, shit, where's this from? What does this mean? Yeah.

And but so many people are unwilling to do that. Yep. I mean, it's one of those things and it gets so deeply because like black doctors under prescribed painkillers to black patients, just like black cops, when they do these, like they'll have these games where like you have to shoot someone who there's like a bunch of people flash on the screen, some have guns, some don't black cops are more likely to shoot unarmed black people like the unarmed white people. It's just like, that's how it works because mental colonization and internalized white

supremacy. You know what I mean? That's what it does. It's it's that's how fucking pervasive it is. Yep. Yep. The conferences that Dr. Kellogg held were bizarre affairs. One featured Booker T. Washington, who gave a speech on the Negro race to a white audience

where he begged for equal treatment and argued for the common humanity of all men at the same event. Harvey Kellogg said this, if the human race is degenerating, then we should know it. We should let the people know and we should see what ought to be done about it. Okay. This isn't climate change, motherfucker. Yeah. No, I bet it wouldn't have believed in climate change.

Wait, he said the other thing before that. Yeah. He said he said that before Booker T. Washington got on. So Booker T. goes on his friend. Yeah. And gives a speech that seems to have mostly been about being like, hey, if you if you like help black people out, we can contribute to society. We're Americans, too.

Like we want to contribute to the country, but we need to like not be as horribly abused by the system as we currently are. Right. Because y'all aren't past slavery still, so we're still getting this version. Yeah. And that was the same thing where, I mean, I guess he got booked by Kellogg, but Kellogg went on to talk about like, we have to talk about racial degeneracy and race poison and race mixing.

Right. And like I said, he's a weird kind of racist, but he's definitely a racist. Yeah. Because he's just all over the place. Yeah. But he's just like because he's just he's a concern troll racist. He's a and he's yeah, there's some ways now that she mentioned that where he is a lot like the modern racist who'd be like, well, no, I have look at my black friend.

Like I'm advocating against white genocide, but I have I'm friends with Ali Alexander or whoever. Yeah. Like, like, yeah, maybe maybe he was just the first like really post Nazi white supremacist. Yeah. The first guy to figure it out. He's like, no, no, you can't do all that. He's like, look at that.

Yeah. See, he'd be nice about it. Yeah. You got to be like, no, well, all all I'm saying is maybe the white race is degenerating. Okay. And maybe we need to look at that. And then maybe then we can figure out what to do about that. I don't know.

I don't know. I'm just saying. What do I know? Yeah. I'm a fucking just demonic fuck. And I will say there were other eugenicists in this period who were not Nazis who were saying similar things. I'm not going to say Kellogg was the first person, but he definitely not like now that

I, the more I think about it, the more his racism feels extremely modern to me. Right. If that makes sense. Yeah. Yeah. You're right. The first race betterment conference, which is what these, these events were called included a better babies contest where 5,000 children were inspected, measured and judged based on

their purported racial characteristics. Wait. Wait, someone listening is going to have a great grandparent who won the better babies contest. And I'm excited to learn that. Like a fucking Westminster Abbey dog show. Yeah. It seems like it.

Like it's, you know, what it sounds kind of like is that, um, uh, I think you should leave a sketch where they have the baby of the year award. Yeah. But you're saying they're using, but it was all kinds of different races of babies. Yeah. Like assessed based on, yeah, how well they, right. So like a dog show, so this breed of baby, breed of human being based on my physiognomy chart here.

Uh, this is what this, he's got the perfect Nordic lips. Yeah. Yeah. What the fuck? Yeah. Uh, the conference was a huge success, which convinced Kellogg that he needed to host the next one on the West coast because eugenics didn't really catch on on the West coast the same way it did on the East coast, um, which I guess is good for the West coast.

Yeah. Yeah. Congratulations. California. We just have, yeah, we're again, that's a different kind of racism on the West. The bar is low. It's a little bit different here. It's the same brand, it's a different style.

The conference was hosted in San Francisco and it was part of a wider effort by Kellogg to inculcate his eugenic ideas throughout the nation. As time went on, he grew on into more of a hardliner, increasingly committed to sterilization and segregation. Gradually, he fell behind the times. Due largely to a little thing called World War II, coming face-to-face with Nazi ideology, which was inspired in large part by American eugenicists like Kellogg led to a collapse in American support for eugenics.

You see the Nazis doing Nazi shit saying the same thing American eugenicists are and suddenly a lot of people are like, oh, you know what? Wait. Maybe this is bad. Wait. Wait a second. Hey man, this you? This you?

It looks like this ends with people in ovens. Yeah. Oh my God. Let me consider some things. Maybe if we just look around, our race is deteriorating and maybe there's a problem we need a solution to. I'm just saying, you know what I mean? Seems like it inevitably leads there.

Now Harvey Kellogg was also a very old man by the outbreak of the war, but Naziism did not change his opinions on eugenics whatsoever. He grew only more convinced that Christian civilization was at risk and that the white races were on the edge of genocide. He wrote in 1942 that he believed God, quote, working through eugenics and the Margvelis germplasm, which is like sperm, may save the race and even improve it. So he had faith that eventually people would figure out how to save the white race. Kellogg was in the middle of planning.

Capitalism. He was in the middle of planning his fourth race betterment conference set for June of 1942 when Japan attacked Pearl Harbor. The conference was canceled, and so too was John Harvey Kellogg's own life. He died on December 14th in Battle Creek, Michigan. He died, of course, a virgin. Despite being married for more than 40 years, John Harvey Kellogg bragged that he had never actually consummated his marriage.

So if I had to pick one purely good thing about his life, I'd say at least he didn't breed. Wow. True. But fuck if he didn't completely fuck up generations of people. Yeah. Yes. Generations.

Yikes. Amazing. One of the worst people we've ever talked about. When is there like, you know, some kind of reckoning? Do they just say, oh, it's actually named after his brother? You can go to any grocery store in the country and see his name all over the fucking place. You know what I mean? I guess you can also think that his brother hated him, and he would have hated the fact

that those are now filled with sugar. So I guess that's good. Like John Harvey Kellogg would be horrifically disgusted by the fact that his legacy is now incredibly sugar-like candy for children to eat in the morning. And masturbation is through the roof. And masturbation is at an all-time high. If he thinks sleeping comfortably and eating Spite, you know what, tonight I'm gonna eat the hottest fucking thing I can imagine, masturbate on the most comfortable bed.

Ugh. Yeah. All of you at home, come and curry in order to really, really fully shame Dr. James Hartman. Break his undead spirit. Eat Spice, come hard. Eat Spice. That's a T-shirt. His face.

There you go. You're welcome. Eat Spice, come hard. Exactly. It's a big middle finger to him. Fuck that. Can we put come on a T-shirt, Sophie? That's a loaded question.

Loads. I feel like we've done worse already, so why not? I think we do it. Eat Spice, come hard. John Harvey Kellogg. Now, because I think that's the next thing is come is an accepted thing on a shirt you wear in public. It has to be.

That's our little act of rebellion against John Harvey Kellogg. If I had a time machine, top of my list now would be to get, like, to archive a bunch of red tube videos, along with information on how many hundreds of millions of views that it gets in a year, and just present those both to like, hey, John, in the future, more people than exist on the world right now are masturbating on just this one website, buddy. You lose that war. And I would bring a fucking like a military footlocker filled with sex toys. Yeah.

Yeah. I'd be like, first of all, dude, this thing, this is a, this is a called a Tenga. You ever heard of a Tenga? All right. So this is from Japan. You might remember them from Pearl Harbor. So they got, so this is some really sick technology. This is another one.

You can use your app. Oh, hold on. I've even shown you the VR goggles yet, motherfucker. Like, who knows? It's just. This is a plastic butt that people make just to have sex with. You can buy it. You can, there's two different stores that sell them within walking distance of my house.

You can, if you want to, make a mold of your genitals and have it replicated millions of times like a fucking, you know, like the Gutenberg press. You know what people did with the Bible in your day? They do it with genitals in the future. People are so horny, John Harvey, that when a boat got stuck in the Suez Canal, you know the Suez Canal. It's new in your day. When a boat got stuck in it, people immediately turned the boat in the porn straight off the

bat, John Harvey. That's how it works. Yeah. It's funny. When you search Kellogg's for the Wikipedia page, it's Will Keith Kellogg, which makes sense because he did steal the idea. But then they can't avoid in the first sentence that it is his brother, John Harvey Kellogg became blah, blah, blah, blah.

So yeah, what a fucking, yeah, you know, it's like everything. There's so many corporate, like just like every fucking bank, you know, has had to deal in slave money. But we're just... Yeah. And how every fucking bank at some point supported the Nazis pretty much. Yeah. Just like, you know, like this is where we're at that they can be like, I don't know, it's

a long look. It's just a serial now. But yeah. I mean, in some ways you could say that Kellogg's is legacy is less fucked up than the banks because there was a split over like, like the reason the Kellogg's company became what it is. This is brother fucking hated him. Right.

So that's good. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Anyway. Yeah. What's, what's J.P. Morgan? What's his, uh, what's John Pierre Pratt Morgan's brother like?

Oh, I don't know. But did he have a brother? J.P. Morgan Jr. was a big part of the fascist attempt to overthrow the FDR. The business bottom. Yeah. What a time. What a time. Good times we're having by all.

And again, you have a bunch of people in their own way found their own attempt to try and steer the whatever the fucking course was of this country based on what these fucked up ideas they had. Yep. Uh, yikes. A lesson to be learned, perhaps. Yep. You know, Miles.

Hmm. I guess if I had one last request for our listeners, I know a few of you are great artists. Mm hmm. What we could really use is some just filthy John Harvey Kellogg themed pornography. Just absolutely depraved. And by depraved, I mean him having missionary style sex with the woman he was married to for decades. Yeah.

It's him. It's him masturbating by candlelight. Yeah. John Harvey Kellogg masturbating by candlelight to, I don't know, the crucible. What a fucking bastard. You've done it again, Robert. You've done it again. How you doing, Miles?

Feeling okay? Ah. How you doing, Sophie? I hate my life. This was a rough one, right? This was a real bad one. Yeah. I mean, but you know, this is again, these are the things I think that's the benefit

of this show. You know, like, yeah, if you have to really look back and know how bad shit was truly to be able to give yourself some context, you know what I mean? And to know like how people move and operate and the social forces they use to justify and popularize their methods. Yep. And I don't know, some great news just on that front today. For the first time, Gallup poll just reviewed U.S. membership in a church, synagogue or

mosque has fallen below 50%. Only 36% of millennials belong to a church. And of course, the drop in religious affiliation is directly correlated with the rise in support for same sex marriage. And what has to assume the rise in support for masturbating? Yeah, exactly. We're a generation come. Yeah.

That's the t-shirt, John Harvey Kellogg masturbating to the crucible by candlelight with generation come right on top. That's busy or just some dog tags. That is busy. Generation come. Oh, let's make it happen, people. All right. Well, Miles, you got any pluggables?

Oh, man, just check out the podcast, Daily Zeitgeist. And also, look, if you want something that isn't tied to maybe the news and politics, check out the other podcast, 420 Day Fiancé. We're talking about 90 Day Fiancé, but, you know, like, hi, so, yeah, just chill. But Sophie Alexandra, you know, one of your fan favorites. Yeah, we love Sophia. I'm glad that it was you and not her on yet another horrible child abuse episode because that would have been a war crime.

Yeah. Absolutely. Mm-hmm. All right. Well, we're done with the episode. Go stare blankly into the setting sun and try not to think about all of the horrible things that John Harvey Kellogg did in the name of medicine. Eat spice, come hard.

Spice, come hard.