Toxins and Treatments: Behold Dr. John Harvey Kellogg: a forerunner in the development of antiscorbutic foods, a leader in the control of bodily appetites, and guru of the proper movements of the small intestine, among other parts of the alimentary canal. Wealthy patients (Henry Ford and Harvey Firestone), famous patients (William Howard Taft and Upton Sinclair), military leaders (Admirals Niblack and Byrd), and "the high muck a mucks of health" all flock to hear the great doctor and take his cure. His Battle Creek Sanitarium, a six-story toxin-free terrazzoed treatment center, is the health mecca of the forward-thinking world. For nightly entertainment, he lectures on the physiological causes of yawning, Naturkultur, and tapeworms. The author of Shall We Slave to Eat?, Kellogg praises the revolutionary benefits of Swedish manual movements and regular electric shocks, and he always finds time to preach-arms flailing from his podium. audience gasping from their seats, and white-coated assistants tossing bloody steaks under the microscopes that flank him-on the deadly effects of meat. "I say to you," says the health pioneer, the inventor of the cornflake, of peanut butter, of Bromose and Nuttolene and scores of other foods with which he plans to save what's left of the human race, ". . . a steak is every bit as deadly as a gun. Worse. At least if one points a gun at one's head and pulls the trigger, the end comes with merciful swiftness, but a steak-ah, the exquisite and unremitting agonies of the flesh eater, his colon clogged with its putrefactive load, the blood settling in his gut, the carnivore's rage building in his brittle heart-a steak kills day by day, minute by minute, through the martyrdom of a lifetime." With his new novel, The Road to Wellville (Viking), T. Coraghessan Boyle plays God in the Progressive era of American culture, a time when man believed he was God enough to perfect his ways, to reach a worldly grace-in Kellogg's case by cleansing and scrupulously maintaining the bodily temple of the Progressive mind. Set in Battle Creek, Michigan, in 1907, the book is a big, bombastic look at the crackpot ways of Dr. Kellogg and the relationships that develop between his sanitarium residents and staff. Among the Dickensian number of characters are Will and Eleanor Lightbody, a young couple from Peterskill, New York, afflicted with autointoxication (Kellogg's catchall illness), which in Will's case means an angst-fueled stomachache (his wife has also accidentally addicted him to Sears's White Star Narcotic Cure). They arrive together, ostensibly for the cure, but Eleanor winds up pursuing a titillating interest in nudism and taking part in the first Battle Creek experiments with a practice, inordinately popular among the sanitarium's women, called Movement Therapy. This is the relaxation-inducing brainchild of Dr. Spitzvogel, who, alone with the patient in a quiet room, applies scientific proportions of hand massage to the woman's breasts and womb. Contrasting with the gastrointestinal good life is Charlie Ossining, a young health-food-magnate wannabe who will sip a glass of mucus-colored fermented mare's milk for the sake of a potential investor but would much rather down burgers and beer at Battle Creek's gin mills. Boyle's book has all the nifty plot twists of a spacious John Irvin novel, and it is on fire with historical detail (not only did the good doctor actually exist, but, yes, those are his cornflakes in our grocery stores). Back and forth over nearly 500 pages, he plays the militaristic regimen of the health crazed against the cereal-maker's stock scams and advertising gimmicks-and, after everyone meets just about everyone else, they all end up looking as if they want the same things. All the while, Boyle proves that he still has the gloriously perverse knack of persuading you to laugh at the most disgusting moments. In his 1977 short story "Descent of Man," it was at a restaurant serving live monkey brains (''Beneath the table ... a tiny fist clutched at my pant leg"); here, it is in the description of the sanitarium's five-times-a-day enema processes, and in hearing the rigorous and roughaged details of the residents' health-fooding themselves to death. "The yogurt, for the most part, will be entering you from the posterior end, in a sort of two-pronged assault, as it were," the doctor tells Will. You chuckle at the absurdity of all the treatments and potions savored and suffered at the Battle Creek spa until you realize that one era's salt-marsh bath is another's day of creamed and mudmasked beauty, and that the historical remnants of Dr. Kellogg are with us in the health-food stores of today. (In the epilogue, in fact, we learn that in 1958, at the age of 79, Eleanor Lightbody opened the first health-food store in Peterskill, where she lived until she died of unknown causes in 1967.) In a plot line that plays off today's obsession with dieting and the psychological disorders that come of it, a woman desperately seeking better blood exposes herself to radium, at that time a relatively new and possible miracle cure; after losing weight and becoming weaker and thinner for reasons not clear to Dr. Kellogg, she dies. Black humor, kaleidoscopic compound constructions, and characters on the brink of sex, death, and investing in phony cereal-company stocks-all these make what might have been just another thick but flat historical treatment feel like a long. tight rock 'n' roll song. The descriptive clarity of the writing and its well-verbed enthusiasm make the turn of the century in Battle Creek, Michigan, feel as if it's coming to you live from the health clubs of New York. You can read the sanitarium's incessant preaching as Boyle's mocking of political correctness and pushy right-mindedness. Dr. Kellogg's unrelenting crusade, despite its noble muckraking intentions, generally leads to wrongheaded and heartburning ends. Of course, the suspense is in the prognosis, but it doesn't give away too much to say that moderation is the big hero here. |