Harvey had a lot of things going for him. He was a highly respected medical doctor, a creative thinker, an upstanding member of the Seventh Day Adventist Church, and the head of the Battle Creek Sanitarium, one of the most respected sanitariums of the late nineteenth century. However, his life would have probably been better if he hadn't been so obsessed with sex and colons.
You might recognize Harvey's name from your box of breakfast cereal. Harvey and his brother Willy were the inventors of corn flakes. However, even this small invention caused turmoil in Harvey's life. Harvey, a staunch Grahamite, believed that all foods should be as bland as possible, since delicious food apparently caused sexual excitement, which Harvey viewed as a negative for some reason. Willy held the opposing view that sugar needed to be added because corn flakes tasted like cardboard. The rift caused the brothers to found competing companies, which was further complicated when C.W. Post, a former patient of Harvey's, began making his own identical corn flakes. So yeah, the entire dry cereal aisle was created by sexually repressed nut jobs. Speaking of nuts, Harvey wasn't just nuts, he was also really into nuts, like a squirrel. Harvey, a staunch vegetarian, believed that nuts would save the world from hunger, a fact he had no problem telling anyone within earshot.
Additionally, his obsession with sex was never what you could call a healthy one, and by that, we mean it wasn't healthy for anybody else. Harvey got married at a young age, but refused to consummate the relationship. This upset his wife somewhat in that she had been hoping to have children. Harvey, ever a creative man, solved the problem by adopting forty-two orphans. All in all, his wife was the lucky one. Harvey had it in his head that sex that caused any kind of pleasure was most detrimental to one’s health. However, even worse was masturbating. Those vile souls that dared to touch their own genitals were doomed to blindness, degrading mental faculties, urinary diseases, cancer of the womb, and epilepsy. In Harvey's own words countless people were "dying by their own hand." To battle this national health epidemic, Harvey, as a medical doctor, adopted increasingly severe methods. It started with the bandaging and tying of hands, which was followed by patented groin cages and electrical shocks. When these methods didn't work, Harvey began sewing foreskins shut, then reversed his opinion and began circumcising boys (that's boys, not babies) without anesthetic. Oh, and don't you worry, he didn't forget the gentler sex. Girls were given a nice drop of carbolic acid on the clitoris, and in more severe cases, the clitoris was just cut off.
When not mutilating genitals, Harvey stayed busy running one of America's most successful and famous sanitariums. Some of the most famous people of the time visited Battle Creek, including President Taft. Upon arrival all patients had to provide Harvey with a stool sample, which he personally inspected to judge the health of his "victims". Each patient was then given an enema by a device that would rapidly instill several gallons of water in an alarmingly short amount of time. With their intestines squeaky clean, patients would then be given a course of yogurt, half of which was eaten, with the other half shoved up their ass. Every day Harvey's patients were put through a series of breathing exercises and meal time marches to aid in digestion. Harvey was also a big fan of both hydrotherapy (basically early day hot tubs) and phototherapy (sitting under heat lamps), both of which sound fairly benign, but again, Harvey was a creative man. To save time he built a radiant heat bath, which was a hot tub full of electric heat lamps. These baths were popular, though strangely quite a few people died of electrocution. Of course, not everything was bad. Harvey was also big on not smoking in a time when everyone was pretty onboard with it, so you know, being right one out of a hundred times ain't that bad.
As time went on Harvey's health claims slowly went out of vogue, which all together was a bit of a good thing, except for the whole anti-smoking part. Though Harvey continued running a sanitarium until his death, as he aged he became more involved with other causes. One of these was the belief that god resided in everything, and therefore everything should be worshipped like god, a belief that got him kicked out of the Seventh Day Adventists. He also became a major supporter of eugenics, calling for racial segregation and the ending of immigration to preserve the all important American gene pool. Though today largely regarded to be a nut, Harvey did live to be ninety-one. Enjoy your fucking corn flakes.
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