An extremely rare group of five large teaching charts designed by physician and health reformer John Harvey Kellogg for schools and public lectures, including graphic treatments of the effects of alcohol, tobacco, narcotics and other substances on the human body.

John Harvey Kellogg, Battle Creek, and the Temperance movement
Kellogg (1852–1943) was raised at the center of the emerging Seventh-day Adventist movement in Battle Creek, Michigan. Adventist leaders James and Ellen White encouraged and helped finance his medical training, and after study at the University of Michigan he received his M.D. from New York’s Bellevue Hospital Medical College in 1875. The following year, at the age of twenty-four, he took charge of the Western Health Reform Institute, founded a decade earlier and owned by Adventist stockholders. Kellogg soon renamed it the Battle Creek Sanitarium.

Kellogg promoted diet, exercise, fresh air, hygiene, hydrotherapy and preventive medicine, while opposing alcohol, tobacco and other stimulants. His work was closely connected with Adventist health reform. In 1878 he joined other Adventist leaders in establishing the American Health and Temperance Association and became its president. Members could pledge abstinence from alcohol alone or adopt broader pledges renouncing tobacco, tea, coffee and other stimulants and narcotics. Kellogg also established a School of Hygiene at Battle Creek to train health lecturers, temperance workers, nurses and others.

Kellogg’s message dovetailed nicely with a broader campaign for temperance in American life. Indeed, he issued these charts just as temperance reformers were making the physiological effects of alcohol and narcotics a regular subject of American school instruction. Beginning in the 1870s, advocates of “scientific temperance”—most notably the Woman’s Christian Temperance Union—sought to replace or reinforce moral warnings about drink with lessons about its effects on the human body. State legislation requiring such instruction began appearing in the early 1880s.

Kellogg presumably designed his charts with these new curriculum requirements in mind: In his First Book in Physiology and Hygiene (New York, 1888), he explained that stimulants and narcotics deserved special prominence because of both their perceived importance and “the recent laws” requiring their study, and specifically recommended that teachers incorporate charts and models into their lessons. (First Book, pp. iii-iv)

The charts
An advertisement on page 36 of the August 1886 issue of Kellogg’s journal Good Health gives a nice account of the charts’ origin. Kellogg explained that for years he had taught physiology and hygiene in classrooms and public lectures, using blackboard drawings and charts prepared for his own use. In response to requests from teachers, he selected designs that had proved “the most effective and serviceable” and engaged artists to prepare them for publication.

The complete set consisted of ten chromolithographic charts. The five present here are shown in bold:

1. The Skeleton—The Muscles—The Tissues
2. The Digestive System—The Circulatory System
3. The Nervous System—The Special Senses—The Respiratory System
4. Diseased Animal and Vegetable Foods
5. Air and Water Contamination
6. Heating and Ventilation
7. Effects of Improper Dress and Unhealthful Positions—Imperfect Physical Development
8. Effects of Narcotics and Stimulants
9. Effects of Alcohol Upon the Human Stomach—Temperance Statistics
10. Nutritive Value of Foods—Digestibility of Foods

A 30-page manual accompanied each complete set. The ten charts mounted on cloth and rollers cost $25; mounting on spring rollers in a single case raised the price to $35. The finished charts were advertised as suitable both for schools and lectures.

Though the complete set included ten charts, the five offered here offer a coherent message: Charts One through Three explain the structure and normal functioning of the body, while Charts Eight and Nine highlight what Kellogg believed to be the dire effects of alcohol, narcotics and stimulants upon them. In short, alcohol and narcotics were not simply moral or social evils, but poisons with demonstrable, terrifying effects on human health.

Rarity and references
Kellogg’s charts are extraordinarily rare; indeed, the only others I find are the same five charts held by Andrews University. A set of the same five charts was sold at Michaan’s Auctions as lot 882 of their Aug. 5, 2012 catalog; I am not yet sure whether this is the group now housed at Andrews. I have found no other sales records, and no extant examples of the charts listed above as 4, 5, 6, 7, and 10.

OCLC #1237791026 (the Andrews University group only, as of September 2026). Background from:

• James L. Hayward, “Kellogg, John Harvey (1852–1943),” Encyclopedia of Seventh-day Adventists, posted online Jan. 28, 2020
• John Harvey Kellogg, advertisement for “A Pictorial Encyclopedia of Hygiene and Temperance,” in Good Health, vol. 21, no. 8 (August 1886), advertisement p. 36.
• Norton Mezvinsky, “Scientific Temperance Instruction in the Schools,” History of Education Quarterly, vol. 1, no. 1 (March 1961), pp. 48–56. Accessed via JSTOR.