Practical Manual of Health and Temperance (1885)

AUTHOR: Kellogg, John Harvey

SUMMARY (Ridvan Askin, edited Deborah Madsen):

This book presents, in condensed form, some of Kellogg's most pronounced convictions related to alcohol and tobacco use, general health, food and diet, household remedies for common diseases, practical guidance in case of accidents and emergencies, as well as the detection and management of food and drink that has gone bad. The book also contains brief descriptions of select hydropathic applications. As an appendix, the book features excerpts from “a large work on FOOD AND COOKERY, by Mrs. E. E. Kellogg, now nearly completed” (2, see Ella Ervilla Kellogg's Every-Day Dishes and Every-Day Work and Healthful Cookery; the book in question is very likely Science in the Kitchen).

Kellogg discusses alcohol and tobacco use in relation to their ill effects on health and a series of diseases. For generalhealth, Kellogg advises fresh air and good ventilation, overall cleanliness and hygienic living conditions, proper clothing (no thin shoes, no tight lacing, no corsets), and regular exercise. With respect to food and diet, he recommends avoidance of or abstention from:

• “fine-flour bread” and use “[w]heat-meal or graham bread” instead (113).
• condiments like “[p]epper, spice, salt, vinegar, mustard, and all kinds of fats” (114).
• meat because it is “not necessary to maintain human life,” nor “to sustain either mental and physical rigor, or animal heat,” merely amounts to “taking vegetables at second hand for all animals subsist upon vegetables,” is “unfavorable to longevity,” is “stimulating,” and is “liable to contain the products and germs of disease” (116-117).
• cow's milk, which “is not the best food, because it contains the impurities of the blood of the animal from which it is taken” (122).
• tea and coffee, as their use is “[o]ne of the most common causes of dyspepsia, 'liver complaint,' and nervousness” (126).
• alcoholic beverages of any kind, as they invariably lead to disease (129).

Kellogg notes the suffering inflicted on creatures in order to obtain tender meat: “the butcher and the producer resort to all sorts of devices,” including forced “overfeeding” (135). He relates an account from a German newspaper on fattening pigeons, at the end of which he laments the fate of these “poor birds,” explicitly noting that “Mr. Bergh would arrest the perpetrators of such cruelty” (136).