The Story of our Health Message

Building on a Bigger Scale

“When we have been urged to build during the past three or four years, we have objected on the ground that our buildings and facilities were equal to our doctors. Now that we have men of ability, refinement, and sterling sense, educated at the best medical schools on the continent, we are ready to build. Not less than $25,000 will be laid out in building the present summer. ... SHM 213.2

“Five years since, we became satisfied that our health institute could not rise to eminence and the full measure of usefulness without thoroughly educated physicians to stand at the head of it. We laid our plans to gain this point, and without assistance or sympathy from anyone we have pressed this matter forward. Dr. J. H. Kellogg has been as true as steel. Drs. Fairfield and Sprague, who are studying under him, will graduate at the highest medical school on the continent in the spring of 1878. It is a disgrace to Seventh-day Adventists to do a second-class job in anything. ... SHM 213.3

“The time has come to bring up this branch of our work equal to others, so that all our institutions here shall be number one.”—The Review and Herald, May 24, 1877. SHM 214.1

In planning for the new building, Dr. Kellogg had made a careful observation and study of all the principal establishments of the kind in the United States. The plans had been submitted to experts in this line and had met with their unqualified approval. The building was to be constructed of brick on what seemed to the people of those days a “mammoth scale”—130 feet long with a rear extension for bathrooms, giving it a depth through the middle of 137 feet. The estimated cost was $50,000, to which was added $10,000 for heating and ventilating equipment. The hopeful anticipation of a bright future for the institution was thus set forth: SHM 214.2

“Altogether, this institution is the one par excellence of its kind in America. With an efficient corps of physicians, at whose head stands a thoroughly scientific man, in the front rank of his profession—having a board of trustees of tried ability and judgment, whose president is acknowledged to be one of the best financiers in the state, and a man whose life thus far has been spent in the successful carrying forward of grand enterprises—with all the facilities that science and long experience can devise—with a wide and enviable reputation, and an ever-increasing patronage—the Medical and Surgical Sanitarium of Battle Creek, Michigan, is destined to wield a mighty influence in the world, and to be a powerful means of breaking down the old, pernicious autocracy of empirical medical practice, and of encouraging sanitary reform.”—The Health Reformer, September, 1877. SHM 214.3