Prophetess of Health

Chapter 8: Fighting the Good Fight

By Ronald L. Numbers

"In these letters which I write, in the testimonies I bear, I am presenting to you that which the Lord has presented to me. I do not write one article in the paper expressing merely my own ideas. They are what God has opened before me in vision the precious rays of light shining from the throne."

Ellen G. White¹

 

"We discard nothing that the visions have ever taught from beginning to end, from first to last. Whenever we give up any, we shall give up all; so let this point be once for all distinctly understood."

Uriah Smith²

The 1870s were among the best years of Ellen White's life. The previous decade, marred by perpetual sickness and strife, had not been a particularly happy one for the Whites. It had left their reputations so tarnished that the leaders of the church felt obliged in 1870 to publish a “vindication of their moral and Christian character,” explaining James's new-found success and refuting libelous stories about Ellen's having given birth to an illegitimate child named Jesus and having once proposed swapping husbands with Sister S. H. King. But by the mid-1870s the worst of their troubles had passed, and the Whites were again basking in the love and affection of the Advent believers. “We are appreciated here,” the thankful prophetess wrote her son from Battle Creek. “We can do more good when we are appreciated than when we are not. We never had greater influence among our people than at the present time. They all look up to us as father and mother.”³

While winning appreciation at home, Ellen White was also acquiring limited national recognition through her coast-to-coast lecturing on temperance — thanks in large part to her own niece, Mary L. Clough, who joined the White entourage in 1876 as press agent. It was Miss Clough's job to see that her aunt received favorable newspaper coverage wherever she went, instead of the silence or sneers that had formerly greeted her. Apparently she carried out her assignment well, for the Health Reformer reported at the close of the year that Mrs. White had received “the highest encomiums from the press in nearly all parts of the United States,” publicity her thrifty husband valued at over ten thousand dollars. Whatever fame Ellen White enjoyed outside the Adventist community seems to have come primarily from her temperance work rather than from her activities as a health reformer. Despite her personal acquaintances with Drs. Jackson, Trall, and Dio Lewis, whom she visited in 1871, she always remained an obscure and isolated figure in non-Adventist reform circles.⁴

The Whites spent much of the 1870s away from Battle Creek in the more relaxed surroundings of the Far West. In the summer of 1872 they took a much-needed vacation in the Colorado Rockies visiting the family of Mary Clough's sister, Lou Walling. The climate was so invigorating that the Whites decided to purchase some property near Boulder and put up a small mountain cabin, to which they retreated in succeeding years. However, Mrs. White's first visit to Colorado almost proved to be her last. While riding horseback with relatives and friends through the Snowy Range, she was thrown from her frightened pony. When the others reached her, she could scarcely speak or breathe. Their first thought was to find water and towels and try “the virtues of hydropathy.” The emergency treatments and prayer allowed the injured prophetess to continue her journey and taught her husband a valuable lesson: “Faith and hydropathy harmonize; faith and drugs, never.”⁵

Shortly after this incident the Whites boarded a westbound train for northern California to meet with the growing number of believers in that state. On this first foray the Whites remained five months, then returned in late 1873 to take up residence, first in Santa Rosa and later near Oakland. Ellen White loved northern California and found sailing on San Francisco Bay the greatest pleasure of her life. With her encouragement, James established a western publishing house and launched a new weekly journal, The Signs of the Times, to aid in proselytizing the Pacific Coast. For the next several years the Whites divided their time between East and West and occasionally found themselves separated. Ellen never liked staying home by herself, and James's poor letter-writing did not make it any easier. “Dear Husband,” she wrote in the spring of 1876:

We received your few words last night on a postal card: “Battle Creek, April 11. No letter from you for two days. James White.”

This lengthy letter was written by yourself. Thank you for we know you are living.

No letter from James White previous to this since April 6. . . . I have been anxiously waiting for something to answer.⁶

End of the "Visions"

The 1870s also marked the end of Ellen White's dramatic daytime visions, the last one coming about 1879 at age fifty-two. Years earlier Dr. Trall had privately predicted that the visions would end after menopause, and whatever the cause they did. In the summer of 1869 Mrs. White wrote Edson that she was going through the change of life and fully expected to die, as her sister Sarah had done.

I am not in good health. . . . I have more indications of going down into the grave than of rallying. My vitality is at a low ebb. Your Aunt Sarah died passing through this critical time. My lungs are affected. Dr. Trall said I would probably go with consumption in this time. Dr. Jackson said I should probably fail in this time. Nature would be severely taxed, and the only question would be, were there vital forces remaining to sustain the change of nature. My lungs have remained unaffected until last winter. The fainting fit I had on the cars nearly closed my life. My lungs are painful. How I shall come out I cannot tell. I suffer much pain.

Somehow she survived the ordeal, which may have lasted until the mid-1870s; but thereafter her public visions apparently grew less and less frequent. For the remainder of her life she received her heavenly communications by means of dreams — “visions of the night” — unaccompanied by any outward physical manifestations. When her son Willie once asked how she knew that her dreams were not of the ordinary variety, she explained that the angel guide in her visions of the night was the same heavenly being who previously instructed her during her daytime trances. Thus she had no reason to doubt their divine origin.⁷

Death of James

On August 6, 1881, Ellen White suffered one of the severest blows of her life: the tragic loss of her husband, James. Only two weeks earlier he had seemed in perfect health. But a trip to Charlotte, Michigan, had chilled him, and the best efforts of Dr. Kellogg and the sanitarium staff proved in vain. Ellen's thirty-five-year marriage to James had been a good one, but not without its trials. On the one hand, James was not the easiest man to get along with. “He was of an eager, impetuous nature, and not seldom gave offense,” wrote one pioneer Adventist historian. He was also excessively jealous of his wife's friendship with real or imagined rivals in the church hierarchy and refused on occasion to sleep in the same house with her. On the other hand, he was a person quick to forgive and to make amends, and he had his own cross to bear — living with a woman whose criticisms and reproofs came backed with divine authority.⁸

Whatever his failings, Ellen White loved and respected him and leaned on him in her hours of need. Without him, her career as a prophetess would probably never have gotten off the ground. Since the 1840s, publishing had been his passion and the key to her success. In those early days it was he who insisted on printing her visions, after patiently correcting her grammar and polishing her style. It was through his journals and publishing houses that thousands received her testimonies and joined the church. And it was his efforts that culminated in a strong central organization, over which he served as president for ten critical years, founding both the Western Health Reform Institute and Battle Creek College. Seventh-day Adventism would not have been the same without Ellen White; it would not have existed without James.⁹

Following her husband's death, the grief-stricken widow sank into a year-long depression. She struggled to remain active, but at nights “deep sorrow” came over her as she expectantly awaited her own demise. Then one night the Lord appeared to her in a dream and said: “LIVE. I have put My Spirit upon your son, W. C. White, that he may be your counselor. I have given him the spirit of wisdom, and a discerning, perceptive mind.” Comforted by these words and the knowledge that her favorite son Willie would remain by her side, she resumed her ministry with renewed zeal.¹⁰

World Traveler

In her widowhood Ellen White literally followed the spread of Adventism around the world, from Europe to the South Pacific. From 1885 to 1887 she made her home in Switzerland, where John N. Andrews had gone in 1874 as the first Seventh-day Adventist missionary. Within two years he had founded a magazine, Les Signes des Temps, and set up headquarters in Basel, centrally located near France and Germany. By 1884 Switzerland alone had over two hundred Adventist believers, a publishing house was under construction, and the leaders in Europe were anxious for a visit from Mrs. White and her son Willie, who had been associated with the publishing work in Battle Creek and Oakland. Thus on August 8, 1885, Ellen White and family sailed from Boston on the steamer Cephalonia, and a month later were setting up housekeeping in an apartment above the new Basel press. For the next two years the thrill of sightseeing and speaking in new places tended to divert Mrs. White's attention from health reform, although she did squeeze in an occasional temperance lecture, drawing an estimated thirteen hundred in Christiania (Oslo), Norway.¹¹

The years 1887 to 1891 found her back in the United States fighting a doctrinal battle to shift the focus of Adventist theology from the Ten Commandments to the love and righteousness of Christ. But late in 1891, in response to an earnest appeal for her presence, she departed with a clutch of assistants for Australia and New Zealand, where she remained until 1900. Adventist missionaries had arrived in Melbourne only six years earlier and had, as usual, immediately set about to start a periodical and publishing house. By the time of Mrs. White's arrival the greatest need was for a school to train workers, and it was this task to which the sixty-four-year-old prophetess put her hand. One night in a dream the Lord showed her the ideal spot for a Bible training school, and a short time later it was discovered in the country about seventy-five miles north of Sydney. There in rural Cooranbong Mrs. White served as a true “medical missionary,” opening her home as “an asylum for the sick and afflicted.” (Her favorite remedy for everything from fevers to bruises was the charcoal poultice.) Her frequent acts of kindness won the love and affection of all around her and prompted one grateful recipient of a sack of flour to follow her back to America to take care of her farm.¹²

A painful bout of rheumatism during her first year in Australia caused her to wonder at times why she had ever left the comforts of home. But she refused to let her suffering curtail her writing, and produced twenty-five hundred pages of manuscript under the most awkward conditions: “First my hair-cloth chair is bolstered up with pillows, then they have a frame, a box batted with pillows which I rest my limbs upon and a rubber pillow under them. My table is drawn up close to me, and I thus write with my paper on a cardboard in my lap.”¹³

With the exception of this rheumatic attack, which lasted about eleven months, Ellen White enjoyed remarkably good health for a woman her age and with her history. When illness did come, she no longer followed her former practice of calling in the brethren to pray for her recovery. Since she was never healed outright as a result of such prayers, she feared that allowing others to pray for her would only produce disappointment and skepticism, as she explained to the General Conference committee in 1890: “I never yet have been healed out and out; and that is why I do not call on any one to pray for me, because they will expect that I will be healed, and I know from the past I will not be healed; that is, that I shall not have the work done right then and there. . . .” Through the years she had also grown reluctant to pray for the sick herself because those healed often turned out to be unworthy: “One, after having grown to years, became a notorious thief; another became licentious, and another, though grown to manhood, has no love for God or his truth.”¹⁴

While living in Australia, Mrs. White noted that the medical work was an excellent means of breaking down prejudice toward Adventism. From time to time prominent citizens, who had little or no interest in doctrine, would come to the Seventh-day Adventists with a request to establish a sanitarium or treatment room in their town. Once in operation these institutions created a positive image for Adventists and made it easier for their evangelists to come in and preach what was commonly called “the third angel's message.” So successful was this approach, Ellen White declared in 1899 that nothing converted “the people like the medical missionary work.” The following year she published a volume of testimonies urging that the health work be used as “an entering wedge, making a way for other truths to reach the heart.” Henceforth, gospel and medical workers were to join hands in converting the world.¹⁵

The Medical Work

Upon returning to America in 1900, Mrs. White purchased a comfortable farm near St. Helena, California, and returned to the mountains north of San Francisco to live on her royalties and her ministerial salary. Now well past seventy, she appeared to be nearing the end of a long and colorful career. But instead of quietly fading away, she entered one of her most productive periods, writing voluminously and directing a major campaign to establish Adventist sanitariums “near every large city.” In addition to the main sanitarium in Battle Creek, the church was already operating several other hydropathic institutions. In 1878 Dr. Merritt Kellogg, hoping to attract invalids and pleasure seekers from the San Francisco Bay area, had opened a Rural Health Retreat in St. Helena. The success of his venture and especially that of his brother in Battle Creek encouraged others, and by 1900 Adventists were running medical centers of one kind or another in more than a half-dozen locations, including Portland, Oregon; Boulder, Colorado; Copenhagen, Denmark; and Sydney, Australia. Behind all these early efforts Ellen White's influence could be seen, but it was not until the first decade of this century that she began sanitarium-building in earnest.¹⁶

The event that triggered her twentieth-century campaign was the burning of the Battle Creek Sanitarium early in the morning of February 18, 1902. To Dr. Kellogg and his colleagues, the fire was a personal and denominational tragedy, but Ellen White saw it as a sign of divine displeasure with overcentralization in Battle Creek. Instead of supporting Kellogg's plan to rebuild in the same location, she seized this God-given opportunity to push for the opening of many smaller sanitariums in rural settings outside large cities. “My warning is: keep out of the cities,” she declared in 1903. This insistence on country settings stemmed partially from a desire to return to nature — “God's physician” — and partially from a deep-seated fear of the labor unions that were beginning to infest urban areas. The Lord had shown her that these organizations would be used by Satan to bring about the “time of trouble” predicted for God's people in the last days, and she wanted “nothing to do with them.” Union membership is a violation of the commandments of God, she told the church, “for to belong to these unions means to disregard the entire Decalogue.”¹⁷

The scene of Mrs. White's most intensive sanitarium-building was Southern California, where the financial disaster of 1887 had sent real-estate prices plummeting. By the turn of the century defunct tourist and health resorts littered the landscape, priced at a fraction of their original cost. Guided by revelations from the Lord “in the night season,” Ellen White helped to select three choice sanitarium sites in the years 1904 and 1905: in Paradise Valley outside San Diego, in Glendale on the outskirts of Los Angeles, and in Loma Linda near Redlands and Riverside. During the same decade she also assisted, directly or indirectly, in establishing sanitariums near the cities of Washington (Takoma Park), Chicago (Hinsdale), Boston (Melrose), and Nashville (Madison), as well as in several other places both in America and abroad.¹⁸

Her involvement with these new institutions went far beyond mere verbal encouragement. She personally inspected many of the locations and sometimes helped raise the necessary funds. When the Southern California conference officers hesitated to purchase property in drought-stricken Paradise Valley, Ellen White herself borrowed two thousand dollars to help close the deal and later took a keen interest in the sanitarium's day-to-day operations. She was also intimately connected with the financing and staffing of the Loma Linda Sanitarium, where she was a frequent and popular visitor.¹⁹

Even this late in her life she advised sanitarium personnel to use only natural, drugless remedies, and to avoid such newfangled (and expensive) electrical devices as the X-ray machine, which God had shown her was “not the great blessing that some suppose it to be.”²⁰ Her sanitariums were not intended to compete with “worldly” hospitals and health resorts, but were to serve as unique medical missionary centers ministering as much to spiritual as physical needs. “Our sanitariums,” she stressed over and over again, “are to be established for one object, the advancement of present truth.” If they failed in that mission, she could see no reason for their existence. On this point she parted company with Dr. John Kellogg, who had been fighting this “narrow sectarian spirit” for years. As early as 1893 he had spoken out against the feeling in some Adventist quarters “that work for the needy and suffering unless done with a direct proselytizing motive was of no account and that it was not in the interests of the cause.”²¹

To “serve as feeders to the sanitariums located in the country,” Ellen White advocated setting up an urban network of hygienic restaurants and treatment rooms. These establishments would not only recruit patients but, more important, would acquaint city dwellers with the principles of Adventism. According to her divine instructions, “one of the principal reasons why hygienic restaurants and treatment-rooms should be established in the centers of large cities is that by this means the attention of leading men will be called to the third angel's message.” However, the restaurant business never lived up to her early expectations, largely because proprietors tended to place economic above spiritual interests. As the prophetess put it, they “lost the science of soul saving.” When vegetarian restaurants in Los Angeles and San Francisco failed to win many converts during their first years of operation, her enthusiasm for this phase of the health work began to flag noticeably.²²

Because of her undying belief in the imminent return of Christ, Ellen White found it difficult to support projects not directly related to hastening that longed-for event. And in that category fell Dr. John Kellogg's numerous “health food” inventions. Dissatisfied with the sanitarium's “meager and monotonous” vegetarian diet, in the 1880s he launched a lifetime search for palatable supplements, ultimately inventing peanut butter, dry cereals, and “meat substitutes” made from nuts and wheat gluten. One of his first creations, a multigrained cereal named Granola, turned out to be nutritious and pleasant tasting — but also tough enough to crack dentures. After one irate patient demanded ten dollars for her broken false teeth, he returned to his laboratory to develop a product more easily masticated. Assisted by his younger brother Will Keith, he finally came up with a flaked wheat cereal, Granose Flakes, for which he obtained a patent in 1894.²³

When the commercial value of his Granose Flakes became apparent, as it soon did, Kellogg unselfishly offered to turn over production rights to the Adventist church, accurately predicting that it could “make enough money out of it to support the entire denominational work.” But Mrs. White ignored his offer, and a decade later vetoed a chance to obtain the rights to the even more successful corn flakes. She feared tying up so much time and talent in manufacturing mere temporal foods when they might better be spent supplying “the multitudes with the bread of life.” Besides, she was not especially fond of Dr. Kellogg's cereals. “When a thing is exalted, as the corn flakes has been, it would be unwise for our people to have anything to do with it,” she warned. “It is not necessary that we make the corn flakes an article of food.” Her decision cost the church a fortune, which ultimately went into the pockets of Kellogg's enterprising brother, W. K.²⁴

To staff their ever-growing collection of health-related institutions, Seventh-day Adventists found it necessary to set up their own educational programs. The leader in this work was also Dr. Kellogg. Beginning in 1877, he organized a school of hygiene at the Battle Creek Sanitarium, where in a twenty-week course students could either prepare for medical school or learn how to become health lecturers. In 1883 he added a second school to train young women in “nursing, massage, the use of electricity, and other branches of the practical medical department.” And just six years later he opened still a third school which offered nontechnical training for hygienic cooks and health missionaries.²⁵

But always the most pressing need was for qualified Adventist physicians. For almost twenty years, from about 1875 to the early 1890s, Kellogg simply tutored promising pupils at Battle Creek for a year and then sent them on to some “outside” medical school like the University of Michigan at Ann Arbor to complete their education. Each summer they were expected to return to Battle Creek and keep the sanitarium supplied with cheap help. Eventually the Adventists had so many of their young people going through Ann Arbor, the church purchased a home near the university where their students could live with fellow believers and get proper vegetarian meals. To prevent opportunists from taking advantage of this work-study plan and then turning their backs on the church, it finally became necessary to have prospective students sign a pledge swearing to work for the denomination at least five years after graduation and to “uphold by precept and example, the principles of hygienic and temperance reform presented in the Testimonies of Sister White, and promulgated by the Sanitarium and its managers.”²⁶

Try as they might, Adventist leaders were incapable of shielding their medical students from all heterodox influences. Time and again young doctors returned from their stay at Ann Arbor tainted by heretical medical or theological views. The risk was so great that Mrs. White finally advised not sending any more Adventists to the University of Michigan “unless it is a positive necessity.” Even Kellogg began to have doubts about his arrangement with Ann Arbor. After laboring repeatedly to correct “errors” — like the use of “strychnia and other poisonous drugs” — imbibed at the university, he concluded it would be less trouble to train the physicians himself. Earlier, when James White had made a similar suggestion, Kellogg had wanted nothing to do with what would obviously be a second-rate institution, but now he was convinced he could offer a respectable four-year curriculum “equal to that of the best medical schools in the country.” Instruction in the basic sciences would be given at Battle Creek, while much of the clinical work would be taken in Chicago, where there were several large hospitals and an Adventist dispensary. By the fall of 1895 he had obtained a charter from the State of Illinois and was welcoming first-year students to the American Medical Missionary College. During its fifteen-year existence, before being absorbed by the University of Illinois, Kellogg's medical school awarded a total of 194 doctorates in medicine and furnished the Adventist church with a generation of much-needed physicians.²⁷

Rebellion at Battle Creek

For over a quarter century Ellen White and her protégé John Kellogg had worked harmoniously to turn an obscure Midwestern water cure into the center of a rapidly expanding international medical organization, which by the turn of the century controlled more employees than the General Conference. True, they had had their occasional differences, but a bond of mutual affection had always drawn them together. “I have loved and respected you as my own mother,” the doctor wrote in 1899. “I have the tenderest feeling toward you,” the prophetess replied a short time later. Though he found the scientific accuracy of her testimonies more persuasive than their visionary origin, he had since youth accepted her claims to divine inspiration. He had appreciated her counsel and tolerated her rebukes. But in the late 1890s, when she started accusing him of pride, selfishness, and other sins, the relationship began to sour noticeably. On November 10, 1907, Dr. Kellogg was disfellowshipped from the Seventh-day Adventist Church. The charges: being antagonistic “to the gifts now manifest in the church” and allying himself “with those who are attempting to overthrow the work for which this church existed.”²⁸

The story behind Kellogg's sensational excommunication is a complex affair, replete with unsubstantiated charges of doctrinal heresy and sexual misconduct. In retrospect it appears to have been basically an unfortunate personal and political struggle between the sometimes haughty czar of the Adventist medical institutions and a group of ministers that included A. G. Daniells, General Conference president and former associate of Mrs. White's in Australia; W. W. Prescott, editor of the Review and Herald; and Willie White. Caught in the middle was an aging and sometimes bewildered prophetess, whose authority became the focal point of the conflict.²⁹

No later than the first months of 1906 Mrs. White became aware that certain doctors and ministers in Battle Creek were raising embarrassing questions about the validity of her testimonies. In a nighttime “vision” she saw the faces of many of her critics, including Dr. Kellogg, Elder A. T. Jones, and William S. Sadler, an ordained preacher recently graduated from the American Medical Missionary College. “I was directed by the Lord to request them and any others who have perplexities and grievous things in their minds regarding the testimonies that I have borne, to specify what their objections and criticisms are,” she related, adding that the Lord had also promised to help her answer their queries. Accordingly, she sent a letter to several of those she had seen, as well as to Kellogg's associate Dr. Charles E. Stewart, asking them to “place upon paper a statement of the difficulties that perplex their minds.” Kellogg refused to reply, but both Sadler and Stewart obliged Mrs. White by sending in long lists of “perplexities,” which — regardless of their accuracy — shed considerable light on the puzzling estrangement between Ellen White and her former friends in Battle Creek.³⁰

Uppermost in the minds of both Sadler and Stewart were the apparent inconsistencies and manipulations of her purportedly divine messages, called testimonies. For example, in 1899 or 1900 Mrs. White, disgruntled with Dr. Kellogg for not sending her sufficient money to support the work in Australia, wrote a testimony reproving him for squandering sanitarium funds on an elaborately furnished building in Chicago. In one of her special dreams she had seen “a large building in Chicago, which in its erection and equipment, cost a large sum of money.” Kellogg protested his innocence, but to no avail. The prophetess insisted her information was correct and cited an article in the New York Observer as proof. Upon returning to America, she reportedly even asked to visit the Chicago building the Lord had shown her. Only when it could not be found did she concede that perhaps a slight mistake had been made. After learning from Judge Jesse Arthur, legal counsel for the sanitarium, that plans for the erection of a large building in Chicago had indeed been discussed (while Kellogg was away in Europe), she suggested that the real purpose of her vision had not been to condemn an accomplished fact, as she had previously thought, but to serve as “an object-lesson for our people, warning them not to invest largely of their means in property in Chicago, or any other city.” But the damage had been done. A man had been falsely accused on the basis of a vision, and Stewart, for one, was not willing to blame God for the mistake.³¹

Another point of contention related to the handling of testimonies regarding the building of the Battle Creek Sanitarium following the disastrous fire of February 18, 1902. After four new stories had gone up, a testimony appeared in 1905 publicly censuring Kellogg and his colleagues for going against “the expressed will of God” in rebuilding another large sanitarium instead of several smaller ones. At the same time Mrs. White released an earlier testimony, dated just two days after the fire, indicating divine opposition to raising another “mammoth institution.” Kellogg was mystified. He knew he had received no such testimony; yet the impression was deliberately being given that he had. On being asked to explain what was going on, Mrs. White's secretary confirmed that the earlier testimony, though written in manuscript form on February 20, 1902, had never been sent to him and in fact had never left the office until December, 1905, when it had been taken to the printers. “It is difficult to comprehend,” said Stewart in his letter to Mrs. White, “why such a vital message as this should have been withheld, and since it was withheld, it is still quite difficult to imagine what good purpose was served by publishing it three years later . . . especially when a false impression has been created by its appearance in this connection.”³²

In view of Ellen White's continuing insistence that “There is, throughout my printed works, a harmony with present teaching,” it was practically inevitable that questions would also be asked about her inconsistency as a health reformer. Predictably, Dr. Stewart inquired not only about her apparently contradictory statements on the use of milk, butter, and eggs, but also about her personal eating habits. How, he asked, did she harmonize her own years of meat-eating with her assertion that “God gave the light on health reform and those who rejected it, rejected God”? Was he to conclude that testimonies written during "the period between 1868 and 1894 in which you ate meat and oysters and served meat on your table... contrary to the light God had given you" were not truly of the Lord?³³

The Battle Creek dissidents were also perplexed by Mrs. White's practice of appropriating the writings of others and passing them off as her own. In one of her own books alone, Sketches from the Life of Paul (1883), Stewart had discovered “over two hundred places” that corresponded remarkably with passages from Conybeare and Howson's Life and Epistles of the Apostle Paul (3rd ed., 1855). Similar parallels existed between her volume on The Great Controversy and certain histories of the Protestant Reformation. He had even found a few sentences from testimonies on health reform that seemed to be lifted right out of L. B. Coles's Philosophy of Health. “Is that special light you claim to have from God revealed to you, at least to some extent through reading the various commentaries and other books treating of religious subjects?” he queried.³⁴

The parallels between Mrs. White's writings and the works of others, so disturbing to Stewart, scarcely bothered most Adventists, including some of the doctor's colleagues at Battle Creek. When Dr. Daniel Kress stumbled onto a copy of Coles's Philosophy of Health in the 1890s, he readily explained the puzzling similarities to Ellen White's How to Live in terms of multiple inspiration. Isn't it wonderful, he remarked to Dr. Kellogg, “that the Lord should put this into two minds at different times.” Kress's reaction is reminiscent of the response of Jemima Wilkinson's disciples to the discovery that she had copied one of her books almost word for word from a Quaker preacher named Isaac Penington. “Could not the Spirit dictate to her the Same Word as it did to Isaac?” asked one of her followers hopefully.³⁵

According to one of Mrs. White's former literary assistants, Frances (Fanny) Bolton, many of her employer's publications were not only paraphrased from other sources but written in their final form by privately hired editors. The material coming from Ellen White's own hand she described as being “illogically written, full of illiteracies, awkward writing, and often wrong chronology.”³⁶ Upon divulging these secrets, she promptly lost her job. As Dr. Merritt Kellogg, who was in Australia with Mrs. White at the time, described the incident, Fanny came to him one day and said:

“Dr. Kellogg I am in great distress of mind. I come to you for advice for I do not know what to do. I have told Elder [George B.] Starr what I am going to tell you, but he gives me no satisfactory advice. You know,” said Fanny, “that I am writing all the time for Sister White. Most of what I write is published in the Review and Herald as having come from the pen of Sister White, and is sent out as having been written by Sister White under inspiration of God. I want to tell you that I am greatly distressed over this matter for I feel that I am acting a deceptive part. The people are being deceived about the inspiration of what I write. I feel that it is a great wrong that anything which I write should go out as under Sister White's name, as an article specially inspired of God. What I write should go out over my own signature, then credit would be given where credit belongs.” I gave Miss Bolton the best advice I could, and then soon after asked Sister White to explain the situation to me. I told her just what Fanny had told me. Mrs. White asked me if Fanny told me what I had repeated to her, and my affirming that she did she said, “Elder Starr says she came to him with the same thing.” Now said Sister White, with some warmth, “Fanny Bolton shall never write another line for me. She can hurt me as no other person can.” A few days later Miss Bolton was sent back to America.³⁷

In reply to such accusations, Mrs. White admitted that her husband had routinely edited her writings and that after his death “faithful helpers joined me, who labored untiringly in the work of copying the testimonies, and preparing articles for publication.” But it was absolutely untrue, she insisted, “that any of my helpers are permitted to add matter or change the meaning of the messages I write out.”³⁸

For Dr. Sadler, the “most serious of all the difficulties” concerning the testimonies was Willie White's alleged influence over them. “I have been hearing it constantly,” he wrote Mrs. White, “from leaders, ministers, from those sometimes high in Conference authority, that Willie influenced you in the production of your Testimonies.” For a long time he had simply passed it off as loose gossip, but recently someone had shown him a letter written by Mrs. White herself telling of how Willie had talked her out of sending a particular message to Elder A. G. Daniells. His suspicions were aroused further by a conversation with Edson White in which “he spoke very positively against his brother Willie and his relation to you, and [told] how Willie was seeking to manage things in his way, and make them come his way, by his influence over you.” Family relationships had deteriorated to such an extent that Willie was refusing to let his older brother even talk to his mother in private. If the Lord did not do something to prevent Willie and others from perverting his mother's gift, Edson told Dr. Sadler, he thought “it would be necessary for him to expose his brother, and others who were doing those things.”³⁹

Ellen White freely granted that someone had been manipulating her writings — but it was not Willie. “It is One who is mighty in counsel, One who presents before me the condition of things.” Her position had not changed since 1867 when she had said: “I am as dependent upon the Spirit of the Lord in writing my views as I am in receiving them, yet the words I employ in describing what I have seen are my own, unless they be those spoken to me by an angel, which I always enclose in marks of quotation.” For his part, Willie steadfastly denied ever trying to affect his mother's testimonies. If her views were similar to his, he explained, it was because he had been influenced by her. But in spite of these denials, some of the most respected Adventist brethren remained unconvinced. Dr. John Kellogg, a confessed manipulator himself, even saw a kind of poetic justice in now being the target of her testimonies: “I have doubtless been myself guilty with others in this matter, and it is right that I should be punished as I am being punished.”⁴⁰

The pointed criticisms of Stewart and Sadler were apparently more than Mrs. White had bargained for when she solicited them. Instead of answering their perplexities, as she had promised the Lord would help her to do, she remained silent, saying only that “a messenger from heaven” had directed her “not to take the burden of picking up and answering all the sayings and doubts that are being put into many minds.”⁴¹

The very frankness of the Battle Creek letters played directly into the hands of Kellogg's enemies. Willie White saw to it that a copy of Stewart's confidential communication reached his friend A. G. Daniells, who in turn used it to incite the church against the so-called apostates in Battle Creek. When the contents of his letter began leaking out and he had still received no reply, Stewart arranged for its anonymous publication. This called for a strategy session among Mrs. White's associates, who judiciously decided not to issue a formal reply. However, in regard to the specific charge of plagiarism, it was agreed “that W. C. White shall prepare quite a full and frank statement of the plans followed in preparing manuscripts for publication in book form, including (if Sister White gives her consent) a statement of the instruction which Sister White received in early days as to her use of the productions of other writers.” Unfortunately, the precise nature of Ellen White's divine literary license was never revealed.⁴²

The Battle Creek schism profoundly altered the Seventh-day Adventist church, doctrinally as well as institutionally. As a result of the clash between the forces of Daniells and Kellogg, acceptance of Mrs. White's testimonies for the first time became an accepted “test of fellowship,” a development unthinkable in the early days of the church. But this innovation had its price. Besides creating widespread internal dissension, the new test directly or indirectly resulted in the loss of the Battle Creek Sanitarium, the American Medical Missionary College, and a number of leading ministers and physicians, including Drs. Stewart, Sadler, and Kellogg, the most prominent Seventh-day Adventist in the world.⁴³

Kellogg's fall from grace was not, however, without its humor. During the heat of the controversy Merritt Kellogg learned that Mrs. White had predicted that his brother, “like Nebuchadnezzar . . . would be humbled, and driven out to eat grass like an ox.” “I think it is a good thing for you that you have been a vegetarian so many years,” Merritt told John. “You will not miss the savory roasts and juicy joints at that time, as will many of the S.D.A. preachers when they have to eat grass like an ox, as many of them will, or starve, when the fallacies of their teaching is revealed, as it will be in God's own good time.”⁴⁴

Medical College

Without the Battle Creek Sanitarium and the American Medical Missionary College, “orthodox” Adventists had no place to send their young people who aspired to medical careers. Thus Mrs. White determined in 1906 to turn the Loma Linda Sanitarium into an educational center, beginning with a College of Evangelists to train “gospel medical missionaries.” At first there was no course for physicians because she felt it was folly “to spend years in preparation” when time on this earth was so short. But the need for a continuing supply of doctors became so acute that she finally decided it would be wiser to set up an Adventist medical school than to send students to some worldly institution or, God forbid, to the American Medical Missionary College. On September 29, 1910, the College of Medical Evangelists, as the Loma Linda school was now called, opened its classrooms to a student body of ninety-two: ten second-year medical, twenty-four first-year medical, six cooks and bakers, and fifty-two nurses. The American Medical Association deemed it worthy of only a “C” rating, but at least it was legally chartered and doctrinally orthodox. Under the guidance of Dean (later President) Percy Magan it evolved into a respectable and thoroughly regular institution, which today, as part of Loma Linda University, has the distinction of being the only medical school in America to have come out of the hydropathic tradition.⁴⁵

During the last few years of her life Ellen White labored incessantly to ensure that the College of Medical Evangelists fulfilled its divinely appointed mission. Repeatedly she urged its graduates to pattern themselves after Christ, the Great Physician, and to stick by three of the reforms Adventist medicine had come to represent. First, it meant “treating the sick without the use of poisonous drugs.” Since her vision of June, 1863, she had discovered no better remedies than those freely provided by nature: pure air, sunlight, rest, exercise, proper diet, water, and perhaps some “simple herbs and roots.” Second and “just as important as the discarding of drugs,” it meant that Adventist doctors were not to “follow the world's methods of medical practice, exacting large fees that worldly physicians demand for their services.” The Christian physician, she wrote, “has no more right to minister to others requiring a large remuneration than has the minister of the gospel a right to set his labors at a high money value.” Third, it meant following “the Lord's plan” of having men treat men and women treat women. The custom of ignoring sexual distinctions in the practice of medicine was the source of “much evil” and an offense to God. Times were rapidly changing, however, and it was not long before scarcely a trace of these three reforms could be found among Seventh-day Adventist physicians, many of whom continued to revere the prophetess.⁴⁶

Mrs. White's Last Days

On July 16, 1915, five months after a broken thigh bone confined her to a wheelchair, Ellen White, age 87, passed away. After a lifetime of illness and frequent brushes with death she finally succumbed to chronic myocarditis, complicated by arteriosclerosis and asthenia resulting from her hip injury. In a fundamental way her life had been a paradox. Although consumed with making preparations for the next world, she nevertheless devoted much of her energy toward improving life and health in this one. Despite the Battle Creek tragedy, she left behind at the time of her death thirty-three sanitariums and countless treatment rooms on six continents. Over 136,000 devoted followers mourned her passing. In a fitting tribute to the fallen health reformer, the women of the Seventh-day Adventist church pledged themselves in 1915 to raise funds for an Ellen G. White Memorial Hospital in Los Angeles, which served for years as the principal clinical facility of the College of Medical Evangelists.⁴⁷

At the time of Ellen White's death only one other woman — Mary Baker Eddy — had contributed more to the religious life of America. Yet the Adventist leader died relatively unknown outside her church, having never sought or received the worldly recognition accorded Mrs. Eddy. Although she never thought highly of the founder of Christian Science, whom she regarded as little better than a spiritualist, she had much in common with her. Both women were born in New England in the 1820s. As children they both experienced debilitating illnesses, which curtailed their formal schooling; and as young women they suffered from uncontrollable spells that left them unconscious for frighteningly long periods of time. They both sought cures in Grahamism and hydropathy. Early in 1863 Mrs. White found hers through Dr. Jackson's essay on diphtheria, but just six months earlier Mrs. Eddy had left a New Hampshire water cure in disappointment. Abandoning hydropathy for the mind cure of Phineas P. Quimby, she did for Quimbyism what Ellen White did for health reform: she made a religion out of it. Both she and Mrs. White claimed divine inspiration, and both succeeded in establishing distinctive churches. But despite their many similarities, the two women had basically different goals: Ellen White longed for a mansion in heaven, Mary Baker Eddy wanted hers here on earth. Thus while Mrs. Eddy died one of the richest and most powerful women in America, Mrs. White lived her last days in comfortable, but unpretentious surroundings, still waiting for the Lord to come.⁴⁸

Today the memory of Ellen White lives on in the lives of nearly two and one-half million Seventh-day Adventists, many of whom continue to believe “that she wrote under the inspiration of the Holy Spirit, that her pen was literally guided by God.” In the years since her death sales of her two most popular health books, The Ministry of Healing and Counsels on Diet and Foods, have topped a quarter-million. Most of her disciples abstain entirely from alcohol and tobacco, and many will not touch meat, tea, or coffee; and, if we are to believe recent scientific reports, they enjoy better health for it. As of 1970, Seventh-day Adventists were operating a worldwide chain of 329 medical institutions stretching from Kingston to Karachi, from Bangkok to Belém — each a memorial to the life and work of Ellen G. White, prophetess of health.⁴⁹