Post Cereal
Post's poor health found him seeking treatment, and hearing of the many success stories that came out of Battle Creek, a frail Post found himself at the doors of Kellogg's Sanitarium. Unfortunately, Kellogg's many "cures" failed for Post. The daily enemas, light baths, and diet changes did little to aid Post, whose continuously declining health led Kellogg to gravely inform Post's wife, Ella, that he was certain to die. Kellogg's bleakness in his prognosis combined with the astronomical rates that Kellogg charged for his services and the depletion of the family's available funds led Post's wife to promptly wheel him out of the Sanitarium to her cousin's house.
Ella Post's cousin was named Elizabeth Gregory and was a close follower of Christian Science and Mary Baker Eddy. Upon C.W.'s arrival to her home, she began to minister to Post in the Christian Scientist Style. Miraculously, Post's health began to return that very night. [Continue Paragraph]
Following his miraculous recovery, Post decided to open a sanitarium to rival Kellogg's: it would provide similar care, but with more focus on positive thinking, and would also be much, much cheaper than Kellogg's resort. Like Kellogg, Post looked to improve his patients' health with diet, and served the same type of foods that Kellogg did at his resort. Post especially liked one food served at Kellogg's sanitarium, a beverage known as "caramel coffee", a cereal based coffee substitute consisting of roasted wheat and molasses. Before Post had opened his own sanitarium, he had offered to commercially market the beverage for Kellogg, an offer Kellogg refused. Post then began to devise his own version of the beverage, hiring a Swiss chemist to design the recipe. Post sank large amounts of money into the effort, and was completely dissatisfied with the results, so he decided to find the recipe himself, an effort that bought him success. He called the beverage "Postum", and began to sell it commercially. Post's fledgling cereal business was about to explode.
Unfortunately, the marketing efforts of the cereal companies, especially Postum, grew too incredible in their claims. Grape Nuts, which had been marketed as a way to keep a person's body temperature down when it got too high and as easy on the body to digest, was marketed as a cure for Appendicitis: Ads for the cereal recommended consuming large amounts of the product to flush out the intestines, which would cure the ailment. Advertisements also recommended the regular consumption of the cereal as a preventative measure.
Collier's Weekly refused to run any ads for Post's company on the grounds that as a result of the Pure Food and Drug Act of 1906, they had refused to publish any ads for medicine or products that purported themselves to have a medicinal effect. The magazine also reportedly allowed the editor to refuse any advertisements that he thought made extravagant and unreasonable claims. Collier's also published an editorial stating (quite correctly) that the implication that Grape Nuts could ward off appendicitis was not only false, but potentially deadly. The feud between the Postum company and Collier's Weekly that followed was extremely hostile and bitter. Post began to ran advertisements smearing the publication, indicating that the reason his advertisements were removed from the magazine and the editorial claiming that the promotion of the consumption of Grape Nuts during a bought of appendicitis had potentially deadly consequences was that he refused to pay extra advertising money to Collier's. Essentially, he was accusing Collier's Weekly of blackmail. The advertisement, sporting the headline "The Yell-Oh Man and One of His Ways"