Emancipation through health: John Harvey Kellogg’s advice to white women in the late 19th and early 20th centuries

In the late 19th- and early 20th-century USA, at a time when most physicians were focused on women’s health as it related to their reproductive organs, John Harvey Kellogg offered advice and assistance for women’s good health based on their dress, diet and exercise. Kellogg was a physician, reformer and self-proclaimed scientist who was also the superintendent of a popular health resort, the Battle Creek Sanitarium, in Michigan. Kellogg was involved with the eugenics movement and supported measures such as the sterilisation of those deemed “unfit”. At the same time, though, he insisted that white women could achieve emancipation by way of dressing and eating well and exercising their bodies and minds. His work offers a view into untangling the assumptions of the time about women’s bodies and health.