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Hendersonville Seventh-day Adventist Church, NC

David Wright

The Cancer that Feeds on Goodness

Well, this morning is going to be a little different.

It's not going to be as much of a sermon as a history lesson of sorts, but we're going to draw a few lessons out of it as well.

But we're going to look at 1 of our pioneers this morning.

The title we're going with this morning is The Cancer That Feeds on Goodness.

Maybe some of you already have a guess as to what that might be.

But this morning we're going to look at 1 of our pioneers, John Harvey Kellogg.

Now the first 5 were born to another gal, and then she passed away.

I'm not exactly sure what from, but Ann was a little bit heartier because she was able to have 11 children, and in that entire lineup, John was number 10.

His parents, John and Ann, were abolitionists and they were part of the Underground Railroad there in Michigan.

Was out in the fields and working and doing all kinds of things as they constantly had to do to get ready for winter and all those types of things.

A neighbor came by and asked and invited him to come to some tent meetings.

He went to 1 set of tent meetings and he was really into this now.

He was studying his Bible and then Joseph Bates came along and he went to his tent meeting and eventually they were baptized.

By age 10, John Kellogg began working in his father's brune shop.

Something else that's interesting that you may or may not know is that the Whites and the Kelloggs were really close friends.

Now I know that 1 picture of the Kelloggs is especially small, but John is right over here.

He's this smaller young man right here and of course that's not all 16 because they grow up and they move on and all the rest, but they were really good friends.

In fact, on this other side we have Willie right here next to Ellen White and this is Edson and he was about their same age.

I don't know how close these pictures were in being taken together but they were about the same age and they would run around together, they would have fun, they'd get into mischief And you know how that goes.

At the age of 14, John read his first general health book called Health or How to Live.

Now this was a set of 6 pamphlets that were written by Ellen White just 3 years after her major health reform vision of 1863.

And it was a combination of what she had been shown, but also trying to get some support from the scientists of the day and people that had some credibility to support what she had been shown.

And so John Harvey Kellogg got these pamphlets.

He was leafing through them at age 14 and he was so excited to learn about health and nutrition and lifestyle, health reform concepts.

And he was particularly interested because he was a smaller young man and his health wasn't the best.

And he later quoted, he said, it was the sweetest thing I'd ever heard and I got a hold of it and I've tried to stick to it the best I could ever since.

Also that same year at the age of 14, John saw the building of the Health Reform Institute.

So we're in 1866 and that was in Battle Creek, Michigan.

It was based on a vision Ellen White had in the previous year where she was shown our people should have an institution of their own, under their own control for the benefit of the disease and suffering among us.

So that's what she was shown and they responded with this health reform institute.

Now later at age 21, James and Ellen White encouraged Edson and Willie, their own sons, but also John, who they also considered like a son, to attend the RT Trails Hygiene and Therapeutic College in New Jersey.

Now you may recall, and you may be wondering, hygiene and medical college?

Well hygiene was a pretty new thing back then.

In fact, much of hygiene was not very well understood.

The average life expectancy shows a little bit how poor the hygiene was at that time.

By 1900 it was 50, by 1950 67, and today it's about 79.

Now I've heard that's starting to go the other way.

So maybe these principles are still needed today and perhaps it's very relevant even today.

Couple other things about hygiene and why people perhaps didn't live as long.

Fruits and vegetables were largely avoided by many who believed that the deadly cholera epidemic of 1832 had been brought about by fruit.

Of course, there was the lack of refrigeration and unsanitary processing.

Some authorities claim the average American of the 1830s never took a bath during their entire life.

Johnny, your head stinks, why don't you run down and jump in the creek?

It's cold, there's ice on the creek, I'm going to wait until spring.

It's interesting when we look at some of these films of this time period, how they romanticize everything, don't they?

Everything is pristine and everything is just nice and in its place, but that really wasn't the picture.

Even as late as 1855, New York City had only 1, 361 bathtubs for its almost 630, 000 residents.

In fact, 1 of our relatives, they live just outside of Knoxville.

And they live in a house that had 1 of the only bathtubs for a long time.

And people would line up on Saturday nights to take a bath at the physician's home.

I don't know if you can see here, this is actually a horse passed away on the street.

These kids aren't paying any mind, that's in New York City.

Sewage was dumped on the streets, along with trash, since there was not a garbage collection system.

It was not uncommon for dead animals to lie in the streets for weeks.

It's no wonder Ellen White wanted the skirts to come up a little bit, because who wants it dragging through all of that?

And then of course you add all of the things that the horses are leaving behind in the road and then you have some nice dry days and it gets trampled so thin that then it gets picked up in the wind and blown around.

If you did get sick, you certainly didn't want to go to a hospital as it tended to be a death sentence.

And you'll pick up some of that in some of Ellen White's statements about hospitals, but you have to keep in mind the times in which she's referring to, right?

Bloodletting, giving of mercury, strychnine, which is extremely poisonous, but in that age it was thought that fever and vomiting and diarrhea were signs of recovery.

If we can just get them to have diarrhea a little bit longer, if we can just take out a little bit more blood.

In fact, I think it was our first president that passed away with some of these same techniques.

And the headline read, top medical, not technology, but something, Practices used and still he didn't survive.

And I wonder if they were the ones that in fact killed him.

It is said that the army surgeons, the good ones in the Civil War, could lop off a leg in just 40 seconds.

And here you have a crew of people holding down their friend so that they could do the deed.

Since surgeons had no knowledge of germs, stop and think about that, no knowledge of germs or how infections spread.

This was all very new and it was all very theoretical and They didn't know if that was even the case.

They thought some of these people were crazy that suggested it.

They did not feel it necessary to change aprons or knives or even wash their hands between surgeries.

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The Cancer that Feeds on Goodness

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