The Fascinating Story of Charles Kettering
by Dana Ullman (Extracted from the Homeopathic Revolution)
Charles (“Boss”) Kettering (1876–1958) served as vice president of General Motors, and was widely recognized as the greatest American inventor and engineer since Thomas Edison. He held more than 300 patents. Some of his inventions included the all-electric starting ignition, ethyl gasoline, and Duco paint (trade name of a lacquer paint used on cars). He also started the Delco Company (which manufactures car batteries and which GM purchased).
Early in his career, Kettering worked for National Cash Register, which maintained a clinic for employees that was staffed by homeopathic doctors. The company’s newsletter often provided health tips on such topics as the necessity of physical fitness, the importance of thorough chewing of the food (“Fletcherism”), the usefulness of fasting, the value of hydrotherapy, and the benefits of health sanitariums like the Battle Creek Sanitarium created by Dr. J. H. Kellogg (the man who also created the famous cereal company).
Kettering publicly acknowledged the health benefits he received due to the skills of Thomas Addison (T. A.) McCann, MD (1858–1943), his homeopathic physician from Dayton, Ohio (Enstam, 1943, 489).
T. A. McCann, MD, was a respected homeopathic physician who interacted considerably with conventional physicians. In fact, he was one of the few homeopathic doctors to work with the nationwide Federation of State Medical Examining Boards, serving as vice-president in 1914–1915. Dr. McCann is often quoted today as a result of his report on the impressive successes of homeopathic treatment during the flu epidemic of 1918. In 1921 at the 77th annual convention of the American Institute of Homeopathy in Washington, D.C., he reported that 24,000 cases of flu treated in conventional medical hospitals had a mortality rate of 28.2 percent while 26,000 cases of flu treated in homeopathic hospitals had a mortality rate of 1.05 percent (McCann, 1921; Dewey, 1921).[i]
In 1914 Ohio State University (OSU) formally opened a College of Homeopathic Medicine. To help in these efforts, another homeopathic college (the Cleveland-Pulte Medical College) closed down, donated its medical equipment and library, and sent the proceeds of the sale of its property ($30,000) to the new homeopathic college. In the homeopathic school’s first year, an impressive thirty-nine students were enrolled. In 1915, Kettering and Edward A. Deeds (plant manager of National Cash Register, who had initially hired Kettering) gave $2,500 for research work and medical equipment. In 1916 Kettering gave $8,000 more, and in 1920, he donated $7,000 worth of radium for the school’s X-ray machine.
Because the governor of Ohio at the time was James Cox, a strong advocate for homeopathy, and one of the governor’s appointments to the university’s board of trustees was Judge Benjamin McCann (the brother of Kettering’s homeopath), the homeopathic college had important political support. This strength was further augmented by the employment of W. B. Hinsdale, dean of the University of Michigan Homeopathic School.[ii]
However, the AMA could not stand for the development of a college of homeopathic medicine at a public university. N. P. Colwell, secretary of the AMA’s Council on Medical Education, went on the offensive. He sharply criticized the president of OSU and arranged for strongly worded attacks against OSU in JAMA, and later, he even threatened to downgrade the accreditation status of OSU. Because Colwell’s Council on Medical Education had become the national accrediting agency for medical schools, these threats were significant, and made even worse by Colwell’s close relationship with the Carnegie Foundation and its president, Henry S. Pritchett. According to the minutes of OSU’s board of trustees, Pritchett made scurrilous attacks upon the motives of OSU’s president and trustees (Roberts, 1986).
In 1920 Kettering made a $1 million contribution to OSU with a stipulation that it be used to create a homeopathic research laboratory (Mendenhall Papers, 1920; Hertzog, 1949, 1193; Ohio State University, 1922, 440). This action enraged the AMA and the Carnegie Foundation, thrusting them into further proactive efforts to stop this homeopathic college. When Governor Cox left office in 1920 to run as the Democratic candidate for president of the United States, the homeopaths lost some of their political influence.
In 1922, the board of trustees voted to close down the homeopathic college. OSU was forced to return Kettering’s donation as well as other donations that were specifically made to and for the homeopathic college, but OSU actually kept the largest and most valuable possession of the homeopathic community, the Homeopathic Hospital and all of its modern equipment, for its own College of Medicine (Ohio State University, 1923, 441). Kettering never trusted OSU after that. Even though he served on the board of trustees of OSU, he never again gave money to the school.
Dr. John Renner (1890–1989), a homeopathic doctor from Chicago who later retired to southern California, reported that Kettering had also planned to give another $1 million to homeopathy, but the infighting among homeopathic professionals led him instead to work to establish what later became the famed Sloan-Kettering Institute[iii] (Suits, 1985, 123). Sadly, the “Boss” is probably turning in his grave, knowing how his institute has turned away from homeopathy and from real healing.
Kettering’s philosophy was summarized in the question he asked and answered of an interviewer: ‘‘Do you know what an incurable disease is? It’s one the doctors don’t know anything about. The disease has no objection to being cured at all’’ (McDowell, 1983). Another reporter asked him about his conquests of the secrets of nature, to which Kettering responded:
“Hah, it’s not the conquest of nature, it’s the conquest of our own ignorance. And as for secrets, there is only one secret of nature I want to pry into. Why is the human skull as dense as it is? Nowadays we can send a message around the world in one-seventh of a second, but it take years to drive an idea through a quarter-inch of human skull.” (Young, 1961, 193–194)
This doggedness and irreverence led Kettering to continually question conventional medical thinking and to have what the New York Times called “a long and expensive flirtation with research into homeopathy” (McDowell, 1983).
[i] Dr. McCann’s statistics have been frequently misquoted. One modern-day popular book on the flu epidemic of 1918 (Barry, 2004) erroneously criticized the “absurd” statements from homeopaths because he asserted that 28.2 percent of people with the flu could not have died from it or there would have been millions of deaths in the U.S. alone (and there weren’t). McCann was specific in his statistics, and he clearly stated that he was comparing the death rates in homeopathic hospitals to those in conventional hospitals. Sadly, as has been historically repeated by critics of homeopathy, they tend to report misinformation to try to substantiate their case against homeopathy.
[ii] W. B. Hinsdale’s son, Albert E. Hinsdale, was also a homeopathic doctor, and he became professor of materia medica at OSU. One of Albert’s scientific studies was on the action of Kali bichromicum (potassium dichromate), a very important homeopathic medicine that was recently found to be extraordinarily effective in the treatment of patients suffering from chronic bronchitis or emphysema. Called Chronic Obstructive Pulmonary Disease (COPD), this is the number four reason that people die in the U.S. This study was conducted at the University of Vienna hospital and was published in the highly respected medical journal, Chest (Frass, et al., 2005).
[iii] In homeopathy, as in any medical specialty, there are varied opinions on how to best treat patients. Some significant infighting in homeopathy occurred between those homeopaths who use high-potency doses (diluted 1:10 or 1:100 thirty or more times) and those who used low-potency doses (usually 3X to 30X). There were also conflicting opinions on how to best conduct research. Some homeopaths wanted to emulate conventional medical care and test one drug against a specific disease, while other homeopaths insisted that homeopathy required more individualized prescriptions. One of the more significant conflicts arose from those homeopaths who believed that no conventional drugs should be used at all, and those who were eclectic and used homeopathic, herbal, and conventional medications. Kettering’s homeopath, T. A. McCann, MD, was a classical homeopath who used high potencies and insisted upon individualizing their application to the totality of the patient, not just the disease.