Messenger of the Lord

Nineteenth-Century Health Notions

To better appreciate the distinctiveness of Ellen White’s philosophy of health, let us review some of the prevailing health notions of the nineteenth century. At the beginning of the century, a remarkably standardized pattern for the treatment of disease relied “mostly on bleeding, purging, and polypharmacy.” ⁷ MOL 278.7

The cause of disease was a matter of widely diverse conjecture. The Christian world generally believed that illness and suffering were divinely inflicted because of sin. Healing, if possible, was the result of prayer and faith. MOL 279.1

But new ideas were surfacing in the early 1800s. Horace Mann, in his famous 1842 report to the Massachusetts school authorities, wrote that suffering was “no part of the ordination of a merciful Providence, but to be directly chargeable to human ignorance and error.” Further, if people would obey “the physical laws of God, they would no more suffer pain than they would suffer remorse, or moral pain, if in all things they would obey the moral laws of God.” ⁸ MOL 279.2

But changing the source of disease from heaven to earth did not automatically explain its cause. Mann, for example, rejected the idea of an invading, foreign body. Contemporaries blamed various causes, including variations in body fluids, filth and odors as found in garbage and sewage, and stimuli, either too much or too little. For many medical specialists, health was an intermediate state of excitement, and the physician’s task was to adjust the excitement level. Whenever people occasionally raised the possibility that nature itself contained healing powers, as Hippocrates long before had believed, they were “confronted with the almost uniform opposition of the regular medical practitioners, who labeled them as empiric rustics attempting to restore a discredited element of primitive medicine.” ⁹ MOL 279.3

The “stimuli” theory, probably the prevailing treatment of disease, became known as “heroic” medicine. Benjamin Rush (1745?-1813), dean of American physicians, actively promoted this popular treatment wherein the sick had to resign themselves to “massive bloodletting, considered a panacea for almost every problem, and to submit to the violent purgatives and emetics which the medical doctors administered.” The physician’s task was to “conquer nature” with a special drug, the more violent the better, for each disease. George Washington became a well-known victim of deadly conventional medicine during the first half of the nineteenth century. ¹⁰ MOL 279.4

In 1860 Dr. Oliver Wendell Holmes, professor of anatomy at Harvard University, wrote that “if the whole materia medica, as now used, could be sunk to the bottom of the sea, it would be all the better for mankind—and all the worse for the fishes.” ¹¹ MOL 279.5

The second quarter of the nineteenth century, often known as the Jacksonian era, was swamped with innovation and change in most all areas of American life. Emotional, human-centered ideas overtook the rational, classical order of the preceding century. Fresh optimism and the sense of equality of all human beings inspired “reforms” in such areas as education, prisons, abolition of slavery, women’s rights, politics, and health. ¹² MOL 279.6

This new focus on the individual and away from traditional theories was thoroughly evident in the remarkably fresh concern for personal health. ¹³ Distrust of traditional medicine with its “heroic” treatments and pitiful results turned the minds of many in all classes to what could be done with common sense. ¹⁴ MOL 279.7

In this exhilarating era of optimism and its new focus on the “common man,” such health reform movements as the following sprang up everywhere: The temperance movement, ¹⁵ promotion of vegetarianism, ¹⁶ public renunciation of “all evil habits,” (tobacco, alcoholic beverages, tea, coffee, etc.), ¹⁷ development of “physiological” societies, ¹⁸ emphasis on public health, including sanitation and hospitals, ¹⁹ new attention to fashion, ²⁰ and the emergence of “water” treatments. ²¹ MOL 279.8