The Story of our Health Message

An Advance Step

A realization of the world “suffering for want of teachers to point out the right way,” and thousands “dying daily for want of the very information which will be imparted in the course of instruction in the School of Hygiene,” led Dr. Kellogg, in his appeal for entrants to the course, to voice the hope that during the coming winter there might be “a hundred lecturers in the field educating the people on the subjects which are of the most vital importance to them”—those relating to life and health. The Health Reformer, December, 1877. SHM 242.5

The opening of such a school was truly an advance step, for it was announced as “not only the first, but the only school of the sort in America.” Ibid., August, 1878. SHM 243.1

Dr. Trall, the founder of the Hygieo-Therapeutic College, was now dead, the building where the school had been held had burned, and the commendable work that had been done there was now discontinued. So liberal were the requirements for medical training that it might still have been possible for the sanitarium to receive a charter empowering them to confer upon those finishing the course the degree of M.D. There were some who urged that this should be done, but the promoters of the enterprise were positive in their conviction that the time had passed when anything short of the most thorough and complete education should be recognized or sanctioned by those who had practiced the healing art. Regarding this matter, Dr. Kellogg wrote: SHM 243.2

“A first-class, complete, and thorough medical education can only be obtained at some one of the large, expensively equipped institutions in the large cities, where clinical material abounds, and where practical anatomy can be studied at pleasure. The great lack in these otherwise admirable institutions is the universal lack of attention to hygiene. Only one college in the United States has a professorship of hygiene. ... It is to supply this lack, only, that this school is to be opened. It is not intended in any sense to take the place of a regular medical course, but simply to give to individuals wishing to commence the study of medicine a basis for a broad, liberal, thorough, and practical medical education, and to supply to those desiring only a limited amount of medical knowledge an opportunity to become familiar with a large share of the practical knowledge in the hands of the profession, divested of its technical dress, simplified, and put in shape to be readily utilized.”—Ibid., December, 1877. (Italics mine.) SHM 243.3