RARE! "Soyfoods Pioneer" Harry W. Miller Hand Signed TLS Dated 1962

Description: Up for auction a RARE! "Soyfoods Pioneer" Harry W. Miller Signed TLS Dated 1962. ES-7093 Growing Up (1879-1902). The first of five children of Amanda Ehlers and John Oliver Miller, Harry was born on 2 July 1879 in a log cabin on a farm in the small town of Ludlow Falls, Ohio (just north of Dayton). His father was a school teacher. He later wrote that he delighted in working on the family farm but found it "disgusting" to have to kill and eat the animals he had raised. When he was 12, Harry's parents became Seventh-day Adventists. Two years later, after much study, at the annual camp meeting, he and a friend decided to be baptized and become Adventist church members. At age 15 Harry entered secondary school at the Adventist-run Mt. Vernon Academy in Mt. Vernon, Ohio. He loved the strict, puritan atmosphere, the vegetarian diet, and the teachings of the church. In 1898, at age 19, he enrolled in medical school at the newly opened, Adventist-run American Medical Missionary College in Battle Creek, Michigan, which was associated with Dr. John Harvey Kellogg's Battle Creek Sanitarium (founded in 1866), the largest and most progressive medical institution of its kind in America at the time, and the birthplace of modern dietetics. Opposing the popular cures of the mid-1800s (drugs, bleeding, etc.), the sanitarium recommended diet (especially a simple grain-based vegetarian diet), exercise, hydrotherapy, and good mental health as the foundations of healthful living and natural healing. These teachings had a lifelong effect on Miller. Working to pay his own tuition, room, and board, Miller led guided tours through the sanitarium and food factory, which forced him to learn more about the various foods (America's first meat analogs and breakfast cereals) and how they were made. Miller was deeply influenced by the personality and teachings of Dr. J.H. Kellogg, who personally taught a number of the classes Miller attended, treated him like a son, and helped put him through college. One of America's great pioneers of medicine, nutrition and soyfoods, Kellogg stressed to the small class the importance of preventive medicine, nutrition, and diet. He strongly opposed the use of alcohol, tobacco, and caffeine. Miller later noted that almost all the students in the small class lived past the age of 90; Kellogg lived to age 91, Miller to 971/2, and one classmate to 101. Miller graduated in 1902 and was married to a classmate-doctor, Maude Thompson, the same year. During an internship autopsy, Dr. Miller cut his finger badly and soon thereafter contracted systemic blastomycosis, an infection considered at the time to be fatal. With deep faith he prayed to God, promising that if he were to be healed, he would go anywhere in the Lord's service. To the astonishment of his doctors, Miller was miraculously healed. This greatly deepened his faith. Shortly thereafter a call came from the Adventist church for a missionary doctor in China. Miller accepted the challenge. For the rest of his life he prayed for his patients before all operations (minor and major). His prayers apparently brought many a patient through critical illness and sometimes saved them from almost certain death (Moore 1961). Early Years in China (1903-11). In October 1903 Dr. Miller and Maude, together with another physician couple, sailed for China, stopping briefly in Japan. In Kobe, a fellow Adventist, Myrtle Lockwood, first introduced Miller to soyfoods at her home, serving an entree called Tofu Loaf, with which Miller was particularly impressed. In China the couple went deep into the interior, near the center of Henan (Honan) Province, where they found great poverty and malnutrition. They both learned Chinese, dressed like the local people, and even adopted the hair style of a long queue and shaved pate. They also ate Chinese foods, and soon Miller was visiting local tofu shops, learning about and sampling tofu, yuba, curds, soymilk, and the like. He found that tofu was much more widely consumed than soymilk, although the latter was quite widely used as a spicy hot breakfast soup and a warm, sweetened beverage. Dr. Miller later said (1962) that many Chinese and other East Asians told him that they did not drink much soymilk since they believed it caused them intestinal disturbances, which tofu did not. Perhaps this was why soymilk was not generally fed to infants and children. In 1905 Dr. Miller's beloved wife died suddenly of an unknown disease. He was 26. Out of his deep sadness grew an even deeper commitment to help the impoverished and suffering millions of China. Two years later, after a brief return to America, where he married Marie Iverson, Miller returned to Shanghai. Two daughters were born in 1908 and 1910. Then Dr. Miller contracted a severe unknown disease and was forced to return to America in 1911. In Washington D.C (1912-25). Dr. Miller eventually managed to heal himself of what he later learned was a vitamin deficiency disease called sprue. While recovering he taught the Bible at Mt. Vernon Academy, his former alma mater, and in 1912 his first son, Harry Willis, Jr., was born. Soon he was called to the position of medical superintendent and surgeon of the Adventist-run Washington Sanitarium and Hospital, which he developed into a mecca for congressional leaders of the day. He became consulting physician to three US presidents. In Washington he pioneered new techniques of thyroid goiter surgery, which lowered fatalities from 50% to about 1%. He eventually performed over 6,000 goiter surgeries around the world. In Washington he also met William Morse and Dr. J.A. LeClerc, both soy pioneers from the USDA. He later wrote that these men filled him with "inspiration, enthusiasm, and information," and both later made frequent visits to Miller's soymilk plant in Ohio. In 1915 a fourth child, Clarence, was born. Prior to 1917 the Sanitarium had used a lot of dairy products on its vegetarian menus, but in that year with World War I underway, all milk supplies from the local dairy were requisitioned by the Walter Reed Military Hospital. The sanitarium bought its own herd, but the problems that Miller found with contamination, animal disease (tuberculosis), allergies, and the like, convinced him of the need to develop a good alternative to cow's milk. Dr. Miller's son Willis recalls that in 1921, he and his father ran their first experiments with soymilk and tofu on their farm near the Washington Sanitarium. At that time the Sanitarium had a small food plant, where foods such as Protose and Nuttose were prepared for the patients' lacto-ovo vegetarian diet. The tofu was taken to that plant, mixed with peanuts, and further processed. Willis recalls that, starting in 1923, the Sanitarium started to use soy in foods, mostly in the form of soy flour, which they added to their meat analogs. Dr. Miller later wrote that in 1925 he began a few basic soymilk experiments in the Sanitarium's small food plant. (or was it in Shanghai??) Pioneering Soymilk in China (1925-39). In 1925 Dr. Miller accepted the church's invitation to return to Shanghai to develop a network of Adventist health care facilities. The first of these was the Shanghai Sanitarium and Hospital, which opened 1 January 1928, with Dr. Miller as medical director. Because of his training with Dr. Kellogg and his specialty, goiter surgery, Dr. Miller had long been interested in nutrition. Now his interest deepened as he became increasingly aware of the high infant mortality rate in China caused by malnutrition. Thus in 1926 he again turned his attention to soymilk, working on it steadily in his spare time at a small food plant located behind the hospital building. A growing number of orphaned infants began to appear at the hospital. Their only hope of finding food was to find a wet nurse or to be fed cow's milk, which was very expensive in China and which not all infants tolerated well. Miller was determined to develop a soymilk that had good flavor and digestibility, could be formulated to nutritional equivalency to mother's milk, was low in cost, and had a good storage life. Preparing his soymilk at the small soy plant in the typical Chinese way, with cold extraction of the soymilk from the slurry, followed by cooking, he began to study ways to remove the beany flavor and make the soymilk more digestible. On his medical travels in other parts of China, and in Korea and Japan, he visited tofu shops and studied their methods. He believed that the beany flavor resulted from natural oils in the soybean; perhaps if the soymilk were spray dried and then reformulated with fresh soy oil, he thought, the flavor would improve. In the early 1930s, returning to America on furlough, he purchased the necessary equipment for a small soy dairy and had it shipped to China: a motorized stone mill, an American extractor, and a small homogenizer. Soon he was making improved formulated soymilk for the babies, patients, and staff at the Shanghai Sanitarium. The Chinese, too, liked the flavor. Some friends cajoled that it was "undignified for a talented surgeon to be always playing around with beans." Miller was undaunted, yet the beany flavor persisted. One day, in the mid-1930s, the breakthrough came as he was standing in the kitchen of the compound working with slurry from a tofu maker. He later wrote: "I heard a divine voice behind me that said `Why don't you cook it longer with live steam?'" He was not aware of anyone ever having done that before (Blix 1980). Soon the staff and patients noticed the improved flavor and digestibility, and he added some soy oil or peanut oil during homogenization to make it even better. With new enthusiasm he began more baby feeding experiments. Soymilk was added to what was called the sanitarium's "Universal Diet," which also included whole-wheat bread and half polished rice, plus other soyfoods. During a trip to the Philippines at this time he learned from refiners of coconut oil that steam distillation and flash pasteurization improved the flavor of foods containing fats by driving off volatile oils and gases.

Price: 699.99 USD

Location: Fort Lauderdale, Florida

End Time: 2024-12-07T22:37:26.000Z

Shipping Cost: 0 USD