May/June 2002

The Road to Wellville

by Greg Hartman

The ad for Product A claims it cures sore throats, anxiety, headaches, asthma, hay fever, insomnia and heartburn. Promotions for Product B claims it reverses the aging process and prevents or cures all allergies, infection, infertility, ulcers, sexual dysfunction and cancer.

Pop quiz: Which ad appeared on the Internet and which in a 19th-century newspaper?

Answer: Product A is cocaine, a popular remedy at the turn of the last century for just about everything. Product B is bee pollen, subject of thousands of Web sites and dozens of federal court cases on everything from false advertising to lead contamination. Neither cures much of anything; both can be deadly.

P.T. Barnum famously said that a sucker is born every minute. America's rich history of quackery and snake oil, however, makes one wonder if perhaps Barnum was too charitable.

The Three B's

Standard medicine, to be sure, has come a long way since Colonial days. America's first doctors stuck to their European forefathers' simple formulary: Bleeding, blistering and bowel purging. A patient unlucky enough to receive the very best in professional medical care would be fed mercury chloride to stimulate the bowels (often fatally); "blistered" with various caustic agents to draw poisons out of the skin; and bled with leeches or lancets to relieve the patient of "capillary tension" (a.k.a. blood pressure).

Medical school lasted a maximum of 20 weeks and had no prerequisites, few exams and nothing resembling a residency. The best surgeons of the day cheerfully drained their patients of up to 80 percent of their blood. The wartime practice of bleeding wounded soldiers exacerbated yellow fever and typhoid epidemics by covering the ground around military camps with pools of mosquito-attracting blood.

Small wonder most folks strenuously avoided doctors in favor of -- well, almost anything else.

You Say Tomato

Popular home remedies centered on herbal gardens and books such as Primitive Physic, by John Wesley (yes, that John Wesley), which offered simple treatments for common maladies and was a staple for more than a hundred years. Because American Indians generally enjoyed better health than colonists, native practices such as herbalism became popular. American Indians washed frequently, avoided polluting their water with sewage and ate plenty of fruits and vegetables. Most settlers, on the other hand, washed rarely (if ever), dug outhouses near gardens and wells, emptied chamber pots into city streets and believed many vegetables, especially tomatoes, were poisonous.

By the mid-19th century, herbalism had taken a back seat to homeopathy, which teaches that diseases can be cured with minute doses of substances that cause similar symptoms. Early homeopaths "potentized" a single drop of, say, quinine by "succussing," or mixing, it with a vial of liquid, then succussing a single drop of that mixture in another vial, and so on -- sometimes diluting the medicine thousands of times. Since the liquid was often grain alcohol, homeopathy was wildly popular.

Homeopathy is still popular, although modern processing equipment can potentize a formula so radically that researchers sometimes can't find a single molecule of whatever medicine is supposed to be in the mixture.

Weird Science

By the last half of the 19th century, medicine had embraced empirical research and accredited medical schools. The popular fringe elements followed suit, discarding botanicals in favor of mystical pseudoscience and patent medicines.

Arguably most bizarre was phrenology, which stated that the brain consists of 37 "organs," the size and shape of which in turn shape the skull. The skull's shape and texture could thus be read by a phrenologist, resulting in a personality chart similar to an astrological reading. Other fads included electric belts and corsets, bathing in mineral water, astrology and Fletcherism: the practice of chewing food so thoroughly that swallowing was unnecessary.

But the kings of quackery were patent medicines. Always popular, patent medicines hit their peak from the mid-19th century through the Depression, claiming to cure everything from asthma to zits, often all at once. Besides cocaine and opium, popular medicines frequently contained such deadly compounds as arsenic, mercury or concentrated castor oil. Renowned Puritan evangelist Cotton Mather recommended a medicine made primarily of cow flop and urine.

In the absence of purified water, most medicines boasted an alcohol content rivaling liquor. The Temperance movement and Prohibition drove many to solace in patent medicines, resulting in deaths when bibbers treated medicines like beverages. Finally, the Food, Drug and Cosmetic Act of 1938 began to force dangerous remedies out of business.

Put Back That Bran!

The early 19th century also saw an increasing emphasis on diet, starting in the 1830s with a lone voice: Sylvester Graham. Graham, an early Presbyterian temperance preacher, urged anyone who would listen to avoid alcohol, meat and newfangled white breads in favor of whole wheat. In a time when the American diet often consisted of white bread, beer and liquor, salted beef and pork, and few vegetables other than pickles or sweet potatoes, his sermons were scandalous, sometimes causing riots.

Graham knew no more about nutrition than anyone else at the time, of course, saying also that white bread and meat led to sexual excess and uncontrollable masturbation. His theories and proposed diets, some of which he insisted were from the Bible, met with mixed success. His only claim to lasting fame, in fact, is the graham cracker. But he helped pave the way for the Battle Creek cereal giants: The Kellogg brothers and C.W. Post.

The Grain Race

John Harvey Kellogg came to fame as a Graham disciple and chief physician of the Western Health Institute, a spa in Battle Creek, Michigan, started by

Seventh-Day Adventist faith healer Ellen White. Dr. Kellogg, like Sister White, believed sex drained the body of vitality; he and his wife lived separately and never consummated their 41-year marriage. Changing its name to Battle Creek Sanitarium in 1877, Kellogg ran a tight ship: Patients enjoyed harsh salt rubdowns, machine-administered 15-gallon enemas and a strict vegetarian diet, which they were expected to Fletcherize to boot.

Dr. Kellogg eventually took over "the San" from White. His brother, Will, in turn wrested control from John and swelled the spa's coffers through a series of recipes and foods he developed, including granola, presweetened corn flakes and other cereal products.

Meanwhile, C.W. Post, a former "Scientific Suspenders" salesman and disgruntled San alumnus, set up shop in Battle Creek and began marketing his own cereal products, including Grape-Nuts and Elijah's Manna, which he renamed Post Toasties.

Like Dr. Kellogg, Post was driven by spirituality as much as ambition; his book, I Am Well!, was later condensed into a pamphlet titled The Road to Wellville, which he included in every box of Grape-Nuts and claimed could heal the sick. He also crusaded against coffee, claiming its consumption caused blindness, proved lack of character and robbed the body of energy.

Post's and Kellogg's rivalry, including lawsuits and accusations of corporate espionage, turned Battle Creek into the Silicon Valley of cereal: By 1904, 44 companies were cranking out cereal products there, each claiming more miraculous powers than the last.

Roots

Since the great cereal wars and the death of patent medicines, we seem to have come full circle. All the fads already mentioned are still popular today, along with a bewildering apothecary of drugs and treatments with names the patent medicine companies would have loved: dehydroepiandrosterone, Cellular Theta Breath, ayurvedic medicine, colloidal silver, calorie blockers and ear candling, to name just a few. In addition, we're urged to treat things that don't even exist, such as candidiasis hypersensitivity, cellulite, enzyme deficiency, mercury-amalgam poisoning and cavitational osteopathosis.

And not only are Christians just as vulnerable to quackery as anyone else, we also often drive the bandwagon ourselves, with dubious "biblical" diets, dangerous faith-healing practices and pop psychology.

Repressed memories and ritual Satanic abuse, both debunked yet still popular, gained the most ground among Christian therapists. Some theologians even teach Christians to rate their personalities based on Hippocrates' four bodily humours!

The Bible says to test everything and hold fast to what is good (1 Thessalonians 5:21). Yet Christians are notorious for such behavior as refusing to vaccinate their children, then megadosing them with unproven herbal remedies and other nostrums.

Conventional medicine is, of course, far from perfect. And the very essence of our sin nature is our tendency to talk ourselves into believing lies (Romans 1:25). Yet the very fact that our faith acknowledges this should make us world leaders in critical thinking and discernment.

Wise as serpents and innocent as doves: It's a combination that could drive all the P.T. Barnums of the world out of business. 

Greg Hartman is an award-winning humorist and licensed sacred cow tipper. He lives in Colorado with his wife, Sarah, his son, Sam and assorted pets.

Strange Milestones on the Road to Wellville 1810: King George III, still smarting from having lost the Revolutionary War, suffers injury upon insult when doctors treat his depression by forcibly restraining him, shaving his head and blistering his entire scalp. George gets over his depression (or at least learns not to talk to his doctors about it), but dies in 1820. 1845: After 200 years of American bleeding, blistering and purging, Samuel Thompson's grassroots movement against institutional medicine is so successful that only three states issue medical licenses. Thompson's methods, which include vomiting and steam baths, get popular just in time to be no help at all during a devastating cholera plague in 1849. 1895: Ellen G. White -- prophetess, faith healer, strict vegetarian and spiritual engine behind the Battle Creek Sanitarium -- finally shakes her addiction to fried chicken at age 66. She can't however, shake her lifelong fainting spells and chronic consumptive cough. 1908: In December's Cosmopolitan magazine, Horace Fletcher, who teaches that food should be chewed until swallowing is unnecessary, proves his thesis by writing "Cannibals, I am told, always bolt their missionary." Fletcher believes that "economic ash" -- i.e., excrement -- is mostly the product of poor digestion. Fletcher is so proud of how little economic ash he himself produces that he takes to mailing unsolicited samples to scientists. 1935: The May 27, Allentown, Pennsylvania, Call Chronicle prints a woman's obituary next to an ad for a patent medicine called Natex, containing a testimonial in which the very same woman boasted that Natex had restored her health. 1951: General Foods, successor to the empire of C.W. Post, agrees to stop maligning coffee. In an agreement with the Federal Trade Commission, the company promises no longer to hint that coffee causes "divorces, business failures, factory accidents, juvenile delinquency, traffic accidents,fire or home foreclosures." 1992: On Dec. 30, the CC Pollen Company pays $200,000 to settle FTC charges, which stated the company had claimed bee pollen could permanently cure all allergies. In reality, bee pollen causes lethal allergic reactions in some people. 1999: Alex Chiu patents his "eternal life device" on Nov. 23: magnets attached to plastic hose clamps designed to be worn as rings on all 20 fingers and toes at once. Chiu's Web site (www.alexchiu.com), has pictures of his device, along with plans for a matter transmitter, a space station, a unified world government and complaints about frequent FDA raids.

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