Ellen G. White and Her Critics

Her Pioneering in Medical Work

The mid 1860’s found Mrs. White writing at length regarding the subject of health and the need of founding a unique kind of medical institution that would not only seek to restore people to health—and by rational therapies that excluded the deadly drugs of those days—but also to teach them how to keep well. Those writings were based, she declared, on what she saw in vision, and are the explanation for the creation of a chain of sanitariums around the world, beginning with the Battle Creek Sanitarium. ^† To the uniqueness of these institutions, to their pioneering in the fields of diet therapy and physical therapy and health education, multitudes can testify. EGWC 42.2

As we look at Mrs. White’s correspondence in the 1860’s and 70’s we find the date lines of the letters reading like a railway timetable. She was almost constantly traveling to special church meetings, camp meetings, and like gatherings over the country. In the summer of 1877, in the city of Battle Creek, Michigan, the Women’s Christian Temperance Union made a special endeavor in behalf of the temperance cause. By invitation, she spoke one Sunday evening, under W.C.T.U. auspices, “to fully five thousand persons.” (Life Sketches of Ellen G. White, 221.) It was not uncommon for her to speak to large audiences of non-Seventh-day Adventists on such subjects as temperance and the Christian home. Because of her interest in the subject of temperance she was invited from time to time to speak in the churches of other denominations. For example, she writes: EGWC 42.3

“On Sunday, June 23 [1878], I spoke in the Methodist church of Salem, on the subject of temperance. On the next Tuesday evening, I again spoke in this church. Many invitations were tendered me to speak on temperance in various cities and towns of Oregon, but the state of my health forbade my complying with these requests.”—Life Sketches of Ellen G. White, 231. EGWC 43.1