The Road to Wellville Summary
T. Coraghessan Boyle

The Road to Wellville Summary

The Road to Wellville is about America's obsession with health and diet and also about the propaganda and advertising that the health and food industries use to manipulate the public. The novel's title, The Road to Wellville, is mentioned in the novel as the slogan of C. W. Post, a manufacturer of breakfast cereal and the rival of Kellogg, the novel's protagonist and director of a sanitarium. Kellogg dismisses Post as a charlatan, but Kellogg also combines rhetoric with nutrition by delivering motivational speeches to the patients at his sanitarium. In fact, the novel's organization into three parts with classical names — Diagnosis, Therapeusis, and Prognosis — represents a medical variation on the classical rhetorical scheme of organization: exordium, narratio, confirmatio, refutatio, and peroratio.

The novel also touches upon the American public's gullibility regarding pseudo-sciences, especially those of foreign origin. The Japanese Dr. Tomoda administers lung X-rays, Sir...

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