Top 15 John Harvey Kellogg Quotes

A dead cow or sheep lying in a pasture is recognised as carrion. The same sort of a carcass dressed and hung up in a butcher's stall passes as food! Careful microscopic examination may show little or no difference between the fence corner carcass and the butcher shop carcass. Both are swarming with colon germs and redolent with putrefaction.

The ejection from their country of a people whose blood is far superior to their own as indicated by all racial tests

There is nothing necessary or desirable for human nutrition to be found in meats or flesh foods, which are not found in and derived from vegetable products.

The vegetable stores up energy. It is from the vegetable world—the coal and the wood—that the energy is derived which runs our steam engines, pulls our trains, drives our steamships, and does the work of civilization. It is from the vegetable world that all animals, directly or indirectly, derive the energy which is manifested by animal life through muscular and mental work. The vegetable builds up, the animal tears down. The vegetable stores up energy; the animal expands energy. Various waste and poisonous products result from the manifestation of energy, whether by the locomotive or the animal. The working tissues of the animal are enabled to continue their activity only by the fact that they are continually washed clean by the blood, a never-ceasing stream flowing through and about them, carrying away the poisonous products resulting from their work as rapidly as they are formed. The venous blood owes its character to these poisons, which are removed by the kidneys, lungs, skin and bowels. The flesh of a dead animal contains a great quantity of these poisons, the elimination of which ceases at the instant of death, although their formation continues for some time after death. An eminent French surgeon recently remarked that ‘beef tea is a veritable solution of poisons.’

It is interesting to note that scientific men all over the world are awakening to the fact that the flesh of animals as food is not a pure nutriment, but is mixed with poisonous substances, excrementitious in character, which are the natural results of animal life.

While man regards his body as a harp of pleasure to be played upon so long as its strings can be made to vibrate, so long will he continue to travel down the hill of physical decadence and degeneration in spite of quarantine laws and the most minute sanitary regulations. But when he recognizes his divine origin and obligations, and himself as the crowning masterpiece of creation, his body a precious thing, to be sacredly preserved, developed, expanded, and purified for service for humanity in this world, and a never-ending opportunity for development and joyous existence in the world to come, then only will he begin to climb toward the heights from which he has fallen, where he may once more stand forth as the crowning glory of creation, the masterpiece of God, “the beauty of the world, the paragon of animals.”

The man who desires to have a clear head, a brain keenly alive to the subtle influences of the universe about him, alert to respond to every call made upon it by the bodily organs under its supervision, ready to receive impressions from the infinite source of universal thought, and capable of thinking the high thoughts of God after him, must live simply, abstemiously, naturally, and must avoid every harmful and inferior food. He will select the choicest food stuffs. These will consist of fruits, nuts, legumes, and dextrinized grains,—that is, well-toasted grain preparations, toasted bread, toasted wheat flakes, etc. He will eat sparingly, never to repletion. He will exercise out of doors at least two or three hours daily, living as much of the time as possible in the open air. He will sleep eight hours at night. He will take a vigorous cold bath every morning on rising, and, at least two or three times a week, will take a warm cleansing bath just before going to bed at night. He will conserve for useful work every energy of mind and body. He will endeavor to live righteously in the largest sense of the word.

Let us not forget that the sunlight is God's smile of benediction; that the sunshine is Heaven's light and life and glory, the true Shekinah, the real presence with which the temple needs most to be filled; that the cooling breeze is the breath of heaven, a veritable messenger of life, carrying healing on its wings.

There is a fraternity more comprehensive and more universal than the “brotherhood of man.” Let us think and speak of the “brotherhood of being.” Let us see in the ox a patient, industrious kinsman, worthy of respect. Let us see and recognize in the sheep a meek and docile fellow creature appealing to us for protection and admiration.

Man rears his cattle, his sheep, and his poultry much like household pets. His children make his lambs their playmates. Side by side his oxen toil with him in the field. In return for kindness, they give affection. What confidence they repose in him! how faithfully they serve! With winter's frost an evil day arrives,—a day of massacre, of perfidy, of bloodshed and butchery. With knife and ax he turns upon his trusted friends, the sheep that kissed his hand, the ox that plowed his field. The air is filled with shrieks and moans, with cries of terror and despair; the soil is wet with warm blood, and strewn with corpses.

Said the great Teacher, “If your son asks for bread, will you give him a stone?” The body calls for bread, for life-giving food, but how often we supply, instead, such indigestible, unwholesome rubbish as pickles, green olives, fried foods, and various abominable mixtures which bring into the body death rather than life. How often, too, the voice which calls for pure, life-giving water is insanely answered by such disease-producing drinks as beer, whisky, wine, tea, or coffee, and the like.

The sin of self-pollution is one of the vilest, the basest, and the most degrading that a human being can commit. It is worse than beastly. Those who commit it place themselves far below the meanest brute that breathes.

Drugs, Rings, etc.-If drugs, “per se”, will cure invalids of any class, they are certainly worthless in this class of patients. The whole material medica affords no root, herb, extract, or compound that alone will cure a person suffering from emissions. Thousands of unfortunates have been ruined by long-continued drugging. One physician will purge and salivate the patient. Another will dose him with phosphorus, quinine, or ergot. Another feeds him with iron. Another plies him with lipuline, camphor, and digitaline. Still another narcotizes him with opium, belladonna, and chloral. Purgatives and diuretics are given by another, and some will be found ready to empty the whole pharmacopoeia into the poor sufferer’s stomach if he can be got to open his mouth wide enough. The way that some of these poor fellows are blistered, and burned, and cauterized, and tortured in sundry other ways, is almost too horrible to think of; yet they endure it, often willingly, thinking it but just punishment for their sins, and perhaps hoping to expiate them by this cruel penance. By those procedures, the emissions are sometimes temporarily checked, but the patient is not cured, nevertheless, and the malady soon returns. The employment of rings, pessaries, and numerous other mechanical devices for preventing emissions, is entirely futile. No dependence can be placed upon them. Some of these contrivances are very ingenious, but they are all worthless, and time and money spent upon them are thrown away.

Marriage.-Another class of practitioners, with more apparent regard for morality, recommend matrimony as the sure panacea for all the ills of which the sufferers from self-abuse complain, with the possible exception of actual impotence. Against this course several objections may be urged; we offer the following:- 1. It is not a remedy, since, as in the case of illicit intercourse, “legalized prostitution” is only a substitution of one form of emissions for another, the ill effects of which do not differ appreciably. 2. If it were a remedy, it would not a justifiable one, for its use would necessitate an abuse of the marriage relation, as elsewhere shown. 3. As another reason if a “good”, one, it may well be asked, What right has a man to treat a wife as a vial of medicine? Well does Mr. Acton inquire, “What has the young girl, who is thus sacrificed to an egotistical calculation, done that she should be condemned to the existence that awaits her? Who has the right o regard her as a therapeutic agent, and to risk thus lightly her future prospects, her repose, and the happiness of the remainder of her life.

Said a leading physician in New York to us when interrogated as to his special treatment off spermatorrhoea, “When a young man comes to me suffering from nocturnal emissions, I give him tonics and send him to a woman.” That this is not an unusual method of treatment, even among regular physicians, is a fact as true as it is deplorable. There are hundreds of young men whose morals have been ruined by such advice. Having been educated to virtuous habits, at least so far as illicit intercourse is concerned, though their inclinations are very strong; but when advices by a physician to commit fornication s a remedial measure, they yield their virtue, far too readily sometimes, and begin a life of sin from which they might have been prevented. There are good grounds for believing that many young men purposely seek advice from physicians whom they know are in the habit of prescribing this kind of remedy. Few know how commonly this course is recommended, and not by quacks, but by members of the regular profession. A medical friend informed us that he knew a case in which a country physician advised a young man of continent habits to go to a neighboring large city and spent a year or so with prostitutes, which advice he followed. Of his subsequent history we know nothing; but is is most probable that, like most other young men who adopt this remedy, he soon contracted disease which rendered his condition ten times worse than at first, without at all improving his former state. In pursuing this course, one form of emission is only substituted for another, at the best; but more than this, an involuntary result of disease is converted into a voluntary sin of the blackest character, a crime in which two participate, and which is not only an outrage upon nature, but against morality as well.