The Road to Wellville


 By Bruce Shawkey

One of my favorite movies is The Road to Wellville, starring, among others, Anthony Hopkins. It is based on the book by the same title, by author T. Coraghessan Boyle. The book, and subsequent movie, detail the health consciousness craze, as reflected in the whacky goings-on in Battle Creek, Michigan, in the clinic run by Dr. John Harvey Kellogg, the inventor of cornflakes. 

 The 1994 film stars Anthony Hopkins, Matthew Broderick, Bridget Fonda, John Cusack, and Dana Carvey, among others.

The treatments are crazy, and the food served at the clinic is vegetarian, and guests are treated to daily enemas as part of their regimen. 

One of the treatments they supposedly performed was to wrap the patient in white linen soaked in water and let him or her "simmer" for a couple of hours. It actually helped to leach out the mercury that many had ingested that was contained in some tonics that people took to "cure" other ailments. When the linens were unwrapped, they were often grey in color from the mercury leached form their bodies.

Believe it or not, we had a similar wellness clinic in Madison, Wis., at the turn of the century, located on a hill looking overlooking Lake Monona. I did a paper on it for a class in the "History of Medicine" that I took at the U.W. 

 Here are a couple of images from the actual Kellogg clinic:




Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Latest Trip to Costco

Image
 By Bruce Shawkey Time for another Costco run. This time to the Costco outside Verona. First off, lunch in the food court.  Quarter pound hot dog and a Pepsi for $1.50. Cheapest lunch around. The Costco hot dog was introduced to food courts in 1984, one year after Costco's opening in 1983. The original hot dog was made by Hebrew National, and was sold at a hot dog cart outside a Costco location in San Diego. The price was set at $1.50 at its introduction, and has remained at $1.50 ever since.  As of 2018, Costco sold a yearly average of 135 million hot dogs, more than every Major League Baseball stadium combined. Next, shopping for supplies. Dawn and I were at once approached by a salesman hawking cellular service. Dawn told him were just there for a rotisserie chicken.    The  chicken is one of the things Costco is famous for.  Costco has been selling rotisserie  chickens   since 1994   when sales of the item started becoming popular at grocery stores. The cooked bird debuted at
Read more

John "Ben" Bolerud, Mayor of Mineral Point

 By Bruce Shawkey This is a story illustrating how so many lives can intersect and what a small world it is. This is a story of my dad, a high school classmate of mine and his grandfather, and a former mayor of Mineral Point, a city in iowa County, Wisconsin. John "Ben" Bolerud was of Norwegian descent and was elected mayor of Mineral Point in the 1950s and '60s. He road around town on a mule, presumably because of the hilly terrain of this former lead mining town with a history dating back to the civil war (lead shot for rifles). This is how a local paper remembered him: Tuesday evening, Benjamin Bollerud, former Mineral Point mayor, area historian, and traveler passed away at his home on Meeker Street. Bollerud's death marks the end of an era. In Mineral Point history. Bollerud's colorful dress, speech, actions and style was of another era that some may remember but few have lived. This week, the Democrat-Tribune has gone back into previous issues to give our re
Read more

Raymond "Skip" Henderson

Image
 By Bruce Shawkey I met Raymond "Skip" Henderson about 1986. He was (and is) a watch collector. He lives in New Orleans, and scours the antique shops along Royal Avenue in search of treasures. He also combs the local garage sales and flea markets. One time, he found an old lamp and lampshade. He inquired as to its origin. He was told the shade was made from human skin and was an artifact of the Nazi persecution of the Jews. It was $35, and Skip decided to buy it.  He held on to it for about a year and then decided to get rid of it. Said Skip, "I mean, you take it out of the box, man, people do not want to be in the same room as this thing." Skip sent the shade to a friend in Brooklyn, Mark Jacobson, who writes for New York magazine. Jacobson paid $6,000 to have it tested at a leading genetics laboratory. The results confirmed every ones' suspicion. It was made from human skin.   The story ends there. Skip did not wish to have the lampshade returned to him. Skip
Read more