Understanding Ellen White

Statement 1: Dangerous wigs

“Fashion loads the heads of women with artificial braids and pads, which do not add to their beauty, but give an unnatural shape to the head Artificial hair and pads covering the base of the brain, heat and excite the spinal nerves producing congestion” in the brain, loss of natural hair, and even insanity. ⁹ Wigs in 1871 were constructed of heavy materials—natural hair, cotton, sea grass, wool, Spanish moss, jute, and so on. When they bound the head too tightly, according to a physician cited in the article, they confined heat in the head, trapped perspiration, and hindered blood circulation to the brain. This physician advised against wearing “switches, or jutes, or chignons, because they breed pestiferous vermin, whose life is fed by their drain on the small blood-vessels of the scalp” ¹⁰ The physician believed that the tight-fitting, heat-confining construction of the wig was a greater hazard to health than the possibility of insects. ¹¹ Another hazard was human hair harvested from plague victims in China, then manufactured into hairpieces. ¹² Whatever the level of precision in the physician’s reports that Ellen White quoted, her instruction to avoid such wigs appears to have been good advice. ¹³ UEGW 182.1