Brian C. Wilson's biography of John Harvey Kellogg relates to business history as Kellogg did to business: deeply, but at a distance. Kellogg, the famous physician and inventor of the cornflake, rejected commercialism even as he laid the foundation for the breakfast cereal industry. Wilson, a religious studies professor at Western Michigan University, addresses Kellogg's business activities only briefly. Nonetheless, he raises important questions for business historians interested in ideology, religion, and the boundaries of commerce and health.

Wilson's primary argument is that historians of medicine and religion should take seriously Kellogg's views on each. The novelist T. C. Boyle, claims Wilson, unfairly rendered Kellogg a quack in his 1993 novel The Road to Wellville. Meanwhile, Wilson argues, histories like Richard W. Schwarz's John Harvey Kellogg, M.D. (1970) ignore Kellogg's important theological contributions. Kellogg, one of the era's prominent physicians, was a model of what Wilson calls the “doctor as theologian” (p. xiii). Kellogg spent his life reconciling science and religion, and he fused them to create his medical system of “biologic living.” Wilson reads Kellogg's writings, as well as those of many religious and health reformers, as rational contributions to a period of radical change in American medical science and theology. The resulting story illuminates the impact of nineteenth- and twentieth-century American religious sects on diet, health, and reform.

Wilson first explores the context that produced John Harvey Kellogg: the rise of sectarian medicine and the Yankee diaspora. He explores pre–Civil War Christian sects that considered dietary and bodily health necessary for salvation, focusing especially on Kellogg's initial faith, Seventh-Day Adventism. Like many religious groups, Adventists moved west, settling in Battle Creek, Michigan, in 1855. Church coleader Ellen White—whom readers may recognize from Ronald L. Numbers's Prophetess of Health (1976)—claimed to receive divine visions, many offering health advice that mirrored that of contemporary Christian physiologists. One such vision instructed White to build a sanatorium in Battle Creek. White put the young Adventist prodigy John Harvey Kellogg in charge of the sanatorium, unaware that Kellogg would transform it into his personal medical and religious mission.

With sectarian medicine and Adventism as the background, Wilson explores Kellogg's changing attempts to connect Adventist theology with science. Wilson finds this reconciliation both in Kellogg's writings and in his alterations to the sanatorium. For example, Kellogg converted the latter into the newly named Battle Creek Sanitarium meant not just to cure but to proactively spread Kellogg's system of biologic living. Reading Kellogg's lengthy explanations of biologic living, Wilson posits the system as a religion in its own right. Kellogg's theology, in short, argued that God inhabited nature, nature's will allowed for perfect health, and practices at “the San,” as Kellogg's Sanitarium came to be known, helped adherents understand nature's wishes. Kellogg's new priestly role attracted many to the San, but alienated White; she decried his focus on nature as “pantheism” and in 1907 helped to expel Kellogg from the church. Subsequently, Kellogg incorporated ideas from other Christian sects along with new scientific claims, finding his ultimate calling in the vogue work of eugenics. Kellogg's eugenics, writes Wilson, formed the “capstone” of a “theological journey” that blended millennialist Christianity with scientific medicine, rendering both sin and the apocalypse as failings of health reparable only through biologic living (p. xv).

Wilson's concept of the “doctor as theologian” helps us understand both Kellogg and the relationship between Progressive Era science and religion. His work complements that of other health historians who take alternative medicine and religion seriously, like R. Marie Griffith (Born Again Bodies [2004]) and James C. Whorton (Crusaders for Fitness [1982]). Wilson consequently distances the discussion from, for example, Harvey Levenstein's dismissal of Kellogg's “mixture of vegetarianism and hokum” (Revolution at the Table [1988], p. 33). Wilson makes a convincing claim for the importance of alternative theology and medicine, in a clear and animated writing style that makes his learned exegesis accessible even to readers new to religious studies.

That said, Wilson could have approached with more consideration another of Kellogg's roles: the theologian as businessperson. Wilson alludes to Kellogg's reconciliation of religion, science, and commercialism; he acknowledges, for example, that it was not only Kellogg's theology but his turning the San into what White derided as a “fancy hotel” that hurt his relations with the Adventist church (p. 82). Wilson also hints at the tension between Kellogg's denunciations of “the corrupting influence of commercialism” and activities that made Kellogg “in many ways a business success” (p. 171). The book even explores the ideologies of Kellogg's heirs in the cereal industry: the “sometime mental healer” C. W. Post and Kellogg's secular brother Will Keith Kellogg, who started the Kellogg company (pp. 126, 132). Wilson, though, never moves beyond hinting at the relationship between science, religion, and business, instead leaving this important struggle of Kellogg's largely undiscussed. Must there inevitably be, as the author suggests, a choice between a “sacred mission” and “simple money getting” (p. 171)? Applying the author's sensitive understandings of science and religion to Kellogg's business activity would have made for a richer discussion of important questions like these, expounding more fully on Wilson's claim that Kellogg's “intellectual life” illustrated Gilded Age spiritual crises, including “the impact of commercialism on religious values” (p. xv).

Even though Wilson does not explicitly answer questions about the relationships between business, health, and theology, he offers much for business historians to think about. Wilson's fresh reading of John Harvey Kellogg illuminates religious and scientific developments that influenced major industries. The book is a welcome addition to literature that connects business and religion, including Timothy Gloege's Guaranteed Pure (2015), Walter Friedman's Birth of a Salesman (2004), Bethany Moreton's To Serve God and Wal-Mart (2009), and William Leach's Land of Desire (1993). These works, and now Wilson's, perform an important service in reminding historians of food, health, and business that complex personal ideologies—including views of science and religion—helped define American enterprise.