Brian Wilson didn't set out to write a book on John Harvey Kellogg. It just sort of worked out that way.

"Research always takes you into a lot of dead ends," said Wilson, a professor in the Department of Comparative Religion at Western Michigan University. "But you have to pursue it."

Indeed, Wilson originally planned to write about the religious history of Battle Creek when he became entangled with Kellogg and his battles with the Seventh-day Adventists, a group which had, and still has, deep roots in the community.

"It was a circuitous history," Wilson said. "Battle Creek early is filled with all sorts of religious groups and they all became interested in spiritualism. Then the Seventh-day Adventists showed up. And reading about Kellogg and his problems with the Adventist church and just how complicated and interesting that was, I just headed off in that direction. I got into the Kellogg history and it was so rich."

The result, after nearly six years of study, is Wilson's second book, "Dr. John Harvey Kellogg and the Religion of Biologic Living," published by the Indiana University Press and which is due out in late September.

Exhaustively researched with nearly 60 pages of footnotes and bibliographies, Wilson embarked on a journey with Kellogg in which even he wasn't sure where it would end.

His goal? To bring a new, more scholarly, view of Kellogg, who is best known for creating the Battle Creek Sanitarium and his flamboyance and his obsession with health and wellness.

Wilson came to WMU from Santa Clara, Calif., in 1996 and says he didn't know much about the area.

"There were two things I knew about Michigan," he said. "This is where cars come from and Battle Creek is where cereal comes from. I read (the T.C. Boyle book) "The Road to Wellville" and saw the movie and I had this general impression that Kellogg was kind of a quack and a huckster. But I put him back in the context of time and tried to take him more seriously. He's a much more interesting and complicated figure than that."

He found J.H. Kellogg was something of a theological innovator whose interest in wellness really was more about making people healthier and not just espousing some off-beat inventions.

"I think he really was driven by his goal to reconcile science and religion," Wilson said.

He was especially intrigued by Kellogg's interest in eugenics, the social philosophy of improving human genetics to create a "better" human being.

"It was a very powerful movement among progressives in the first three decades of the 20th century," said Wilson, who cited Kellogg's creation in 1914 of the Race Betterment Foundation.

"In 1914, there was a national conference in Battle Creek called the Race Betterment Conference, but what Kellogg meant by that was the human race," he said. "He basically made it part of his religious world view. He thought it became part of God's purpose on Earth, to create a perfect human being."

Wilson said he was aided in his lengthy research by having a trove of state information to tap into.

"We were really lucky because anyone who does work on Kellogg and the Adventists has a huge archival record," he said. "There are J.H. Kellogg papers at the University of Michigan and Michigan State and the Michigan State Archives and, of course, Heritage Battle Creek. There's just tons of material to work with, which for a historian is like a gold mine.

One of Battle Creek's leading historians, Duff Stoltz, said Kellogg is indeed a fascinating figure worthy of more investigation.

"He really needed to start the ball rolling in the health business, especially in 1897, when the charter for the Sanitarium no longer existed," Stoltz said. "He changed it so non-Adventists could be part of the Sanitarium. And he promoted biologic living. It's good stuff today. He was ahead of his time."

After writing his book, Wilson is beginning to think the same.

"My respect for him grew as I read more and more," he said. "Coming from a rough frontier background to achieve what he achieved was extraordinary."

And he said he wrote the book to appeal to a wide spectrum of readers.

"I really wrote it to not only appeal to other academics, but to the wider public," he said. "It's just a fascinating history and fascinating life and it should appeal to anybody whose interested in American history, medicine and the Midwest."

The book is available to order online through the Indiana University Press athttp://iupress.indiana.edu or through Amazon.com.

Chuck Carlson is editor of Connections. Reach him at 966-0690. Follow him on Twitter: @ChuckCarlson4