This volume on John Harvey Kellogg in the Adventist Pioneer Series is a reprint of the 1970-book published by Andrews University Press. The new edition has a foreword by George R. Knight and a number of pictures which were not in the original publication. The book is almost entirely based on the author’s doctoral dissertation which he completed at the University of Michigan in 1964.

John Harvey Kellogg (1852–1943) was one of America’s most colorful individualists and leaders in medicine. He was an exceptionally bright young man who not only learned the printing business at 12 years of age, but was a proofreader at 14, and a public school teacher at 16. In 1873 James and Ellen White encouraged him to take a medical course. Three years later, shortly after having finished his two-year medical course, he was appointed superintendent of the Western Health Reform Institute in Battle Creek, later called the Battle Creek Sanitarium.

In this book we meet J. H. Kellogg, the confirmed vegetarian and enthusiastic advocate of the principles of health and temperance. To make the Sanitarium menu more attractive and healthful he developed cornflakes and other dry cereal breakfast foods, now available world wide. He also developed a number of meat substitutes. In addition to being an able physician and a famous surgeon, he was also a great writer. He wrote more than 50 books, most of them large scientific works, and numerous articles for medical journals, besides serving as editor of Good Health. He was a very generous man who took a great interest in the welfare of children and young people. He and his wife had no children of their own, but they opened their home to needy youngsters eventually rearing 42 boys and girls, and adopting several of them.

Kellogg’s fertile and brilliant mind not only made an invaluable contribution to the fledgling health work of the Adventist Church, it also led to his fall from grace. When the Battle Creek Sanitarium burned to the ground in 1902, Kellogg immediately set about to erect a larger, more modern, and better-equipped sanitarium building. To finance his rebuilding plans he wrote the book The Living Temple which, unfortunately, was permeated with the principles of pantheism. This led to a series of events which eventually cost him his membership in the Seventh-day Adventist Church. He was disfellowshipped in 1907, but was able to maintain control of the Battle Creek Sanitarium, with which He remained connected until his death in 1943.

Due to the fact that the book is based on the Schwarz’s dissertation at a non-Adventist University, the role of Ellen White in this chapter of Adventist history is not as prominent as it would have been had the book originally been written for an Adventist audience. For example, her timely intervention at the Fall Council in 1903, when two letters from her, pointing out errors in the book The Living Temple, arrived at the precise time when the Council was debating the book, is not mentioned. Neither the original nor this edition contain any footnotes, which is regrettable. Students of Adventist history would have benefitted from Schwarz’s research without having to look for the original version of his dissertation. Nevertheless, the book makes a fine contribution to the understanding of an important chapter in Adventist history, and every church member interested in Adventist history should have a copy of it.