The Clever Badger To add insult to injury, the platypus is leading.

Thoughts on The Road to Wellville

I finished reading T.C. Boyle's The Road to Wellville at about 1:30 yesterday morning.  It was an excellent read, and completely blows away the movie version (even though Anthony Hopkins' portrayal of Dr. John Harvey Kellogg was great).

Now, while the book was fictionalized, I thought Boyle's portrayal of the sanitarium experience and of Kellogg's total authoritarian control of the Battle Creek hospital were extremely interesting.  If it were in existence today, Kellogg's entire enterprise would probably be labeled a cult.¹

Let's look at some of the details.

1. One true leader - In the book, Kellogg was completely in charge of the entire sanitarium, from the kitchen menus to the lectures to the "therapies" the patients were given.  Most importantly, Kellogg was the only acceptable source for the treatment philosophy of the sanitarium - Kellogg's methods were not open to debate.  Compare this with the Church of Scientology's reverence for L. Ron Hubbard and the scriptural status accorded his writings.²
2. Unchanging doctrine - Kellogg viewed himself as basically infallible, and his techniques and hypotheses as inviolate.  At a few points within the book, Kellogg questions himself on his methods, but ultimately decides that they're fundamentally correct.  Anyone else questioning his approach ignites his fury.  New advances from outside are incorporated only insofar as they comport with the existing dogma.  External information that refutes the dogma is ignored or downplayed.
3. Control of the members - There are a couple of places in the book, notably related to the interactions between the characters of Will and Charlie and the activities of Eleanor, where Kellogg admonished his patients not to associate with people outside the sanitarium community.  Restriction of association of members is a fairly common technique of cults and other authoritarian groups.  It serves a number of functions, notably keeping the members away from information that might lead them to question the doctrine of the group.  It also reinforces the group ties, encouraging feelings of family and fellowship, which makes it more difficult for someone to leave.
4. Specialized jargon - Kellogg advocated "scientific living" and "biologic living", and his treatments and lectures were loaded with terms that likely wouldn't mean much to people on the outside. The use of such jargon reinforces those group ties mentioned above, and helps to insulate the group from outsiders.  Scientology, again, provides a stellar example of this - Hubbard's work is so drenched in impenetrable jargon that even if you know what he's supposed to be saying, it's a challenge to sort out.  (All religions do this to greater or lesser extent, and misuse of the jargon is often a very easy way to identify newcomers or outsiders.)
5. One size fits most - the sanitarium, as portrayed in the book, tended to admit wealthy patients with a wide set of fairly general symptoms.  All of these symptoms "fit" within Kellogg's framework of digestive and/or dietary issues.  Patients who were too sick weren't admitted.  Patients who didn't buy into the program were considered problematic.  It was implied that the sanitarium accepted some number of charity cases, but in general it didn't appear that the poor were well-represented in the hospital population.  Basically, anyone who could afford to stay at the sanitarium who wasn't in obvious danger of keeling over dead was admitted with the promise that they could be helped.³
6. Blame the victim - If a patient didn't get better, it wasn't because Kellogg's treatment of diet, electrocution, and enema was bullshit, it was because the patient was backsliding.  Or having negative thoughts.  Or maybe incurable parasites.  Or didn't read Dianetics closely enough.  Or read the wrong translation of the Bible.  Or didn't send Benny Hinn enough money.  Or voted for the wrong candidate.  Victim-blaming is almost an Olympic-level sport in some circles, and it's a great way to distract attention from the fact that the great things you were promised when you joined the group aren't happening.  It's your fault, not our Guru's fault.⁴
7. Sex - Kellogg had a lot of hangups about sex, and in the book he actually seems terrified of the notion.  Come to think of it, he had some notions about sex that (if memory serves) were fairly obsolete even in the early 1900's, but that's beside the point.  In the book, Kellogg segregated married couples, and by virtue of his authority to decide when people were "cured" and well enough to leave the facility, was able to exert tremendous control over the sex lives of his patients.  A group that can control the sexual activities of its members has managed to gain essentially total control over them.  If you can convince your followers that sex is evil, sinful, or dangerous, then their normal sexual feelings and thoughts become things to be ashamed of, and they start to think of themselves as weak, wicked people instead of normal, healthy ones.  If you can use the promise of sex as a reward, you can convince people to strap bombs to themselves and detonate them on buses.

There are, I'm sure, several other comparisons to make.  I thought these were some important ones, because we see these things turn up frequently in our daily lives.   I'd venture to say that most of us could see some of these concepts lurking beneath the surface in our local, state, and national governments, our churches, our jobs, or our schools if we spent some time thinking about it.

It might be surprising.

CB
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¹My comments from here forward are based on the portrayals of Kellogg, the sanitarium, and so forth from within the book.  At this point, I'm not in a position to speak to the detailed accuracy of Boyle's account, although it seems fairly consistent with some other things I've read on Kellogg.  Also, I doubt that anything I say here is new to anyone who is familiar with Kellogg, the sanitarium, and it's Seventh Day Adventist roots, but I just read the book and have only recently begun to acquaint myself with the history here.

²I use the term "writings" loosely.

³This is perhaps less a hallmark of cults and more a hallmark of woo.  A lot of medical quackery starts with the premise that a huge number of diverse symptoms are all actually caused by a single underlying cause, and that this cause is easily treatable.  Kellogg's thing was the alimentary canal - either what was going into it or what was coming out of it.

⁴This one has a hidden elegance.  Pretty much any problem you have - health, work, relationship, whatever - will do one of three things without any external assistance whatsoever. It will either get better, get worse, or stay the same.  (Obviously there are some things, for example a cold, that are much more likely to get better with no intervention, and some things, like heart disease, that are much more likely to get worse.)  The elegant part is that if the diet, or self help program, or whatever you're selling is simply useless (as opposed to inherently harmful), and you're careful to exclude those who have conditions that are likely to get worse (as Kellogg did in the book), then a lot of your customers/patients will come out of your program no worse off (and quite possibly better) than they were when they entered.  This, in turn, lets you point to a lot of successes, even though your program didnt really do anything.