Health Reform: The Arm of Seventh-day Adventism

Though “initially, the Adventists’ apocalyptic expectation was of such immediacy and intensity that it overrode any impulse toward social activism,” by 1863 the Seventh-day Adventist Church had been institutionalized, and two decades had passed since William Miller’s originally predicted date for the Advent and end of world. [1] It was this year that White received her first health-related vision, on June 5, 1863. The following year, White published her first book on health, a small volume entitled An Appeal to Mothers: The Great Cause of the Physical, Mental and Moral Ruin of Many of the Children of Our Time. The timing of White’s shift gave the Church a needed fresh cause.

The health reform movement, though it had sporadic surges in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth century, truly took off under the leadership of evangelist Sylvester Graham in the 1830s. He began his career lecturing on temperance but quickly added vegetarianism to his crusade—probably influenced by earlier advocates, though like many at the time, he did not acknowledge his intellectual debts. Graham won a widespread following by claiming that his health prescriptions helped people avoid cholera, of which there was an epidemic in 1832. Graham advised avoiding all stimulating and unnatural foods and to consume only “the products of the vegetable kingdom and pure water.” This meant sweets, tea, coffee, tobacco, alcohol and meat were forbidden from ones diet; dairy products were also to be consumed sparingly if at all. Graham also advised only consuming two meals a day. In his lectures he emphasized these dietary outlines along with the importance of rest, exercise, cleanliness and dress. Finally, he preached that people should never resort to medicines. These edicts constituted the common core beliefs of health reformers through the mid- to late nineteenth century. The Graham system was adapted to a variety of institutions, including boarding houses established by Graham himself but also at Oberlin College, at the urging of Charles Finney, and was practiced among Shaker communities.[2]

A precedent for health reform work also existed among the adventist community. Before the Great Disappointment, prominent Millerites such as Reverend Charles Fitch, Ezekiel Hale, Jr. and Dr. Larkin B. Coles had publically allied themselves with health reformers. Joseph Bates had campaigned for temperance and adopted Graham’s prescribed health reform practices in 1843.[3] He and other men associated with the Whites surely shared their experiences with health reform. The alliance of fringe religious groups and reformers was not unusual, as “the unorthodox in religion commonly displayed a marked affinity for heterodox medicine, which they tended to view in a moral rather than in a scientific light.”[4] The health establishments created and maintained by the Seventh-day Adventist Church were a continuation of this trend.

The theological assumptions and expectations of those who held a moralistic view of health reform did differ depending on one’s millennial theology. Post-millennialists saw health reform as a key to bringing about the millennium on earth through the eradication of disease. Pre-millennialists, including White, saw obedience to the rules of health reform as another requirement for entry into heaven—though of course, she and others did also see and experience health reform as a means to live more comfortably.

Considering the distrust of medicines among health reformers, it makes sense that hydropathy, a system of healing without drugs, became quite popular. Hydropathy, or the “water cure” as it was also known, claimed to heal wounds and cure illness through general application of water to the body, local application of water to particular parts of the body, and internal use of water by drinking and injections to heal wounds and illnesses—essentially, baths, wet bandages, and hydration.[5] Though it originated in Europe in the 1830s, the water cure spread rapidly, appearing in the United States around 1844. Early proponents combined hydrotherapy with many elements of Grahamism, and this combination formed the basis of White’s prophecy, writing and directives on health. White’s introduction of these practices to the Adventist community with her first health prophecy in 1863 and publication in 1864 were not groundbreaking in and of themselves, but heralded a shift in the focus and direction of the church.

White also had clear personal motivations for an interest in health reform. Though she had learned to see her early childhood injury as a blessing rather than a curse, writing:  “the affliction that had darkened my childhood seemed to have been dealt me in mercy, for my good, to turn my heart away from the world and its unsatisfying pleasures, and incline it toward the enduring attractions of heaven,” she continued to suffer from perpetual attacks of poor health.[6]

White took interest in health reform as a patient and ultimately prophet, but also as a woman. Like involvement in religious leadership, involvement in social reform movements offered women the opportunity to engage in work outside the home without overstepping the boundaries of acceptable female behavior. Health reform was grounded in the larger benevolence movement in the early nineteenth century. It was the ideology of benevolence—the belief that women were predisposed to moral excellence and religion, a conflation of femininity and morality—that underpinned women’s work in charitable organizations and social reform causes. These causes were wide-ranging, including abolition, temperance, and relief for the poor, but regardless of the specific cause, “the language of Protestant benevolence accurately described [women’s] efforts at bringing about social change.”[7] Benevolent work had a long history in White’s hometown of Portland, a reflection of the benevolent work that existed in many of the major and developing cities of the New England and New York region in the nineteenth century. As William Willis notes many charitable institutions in his 1865 history of Portland, including “The Female Charitable Society, incorporated in 1812 and conducted by ladies . . . one of the most efficient and useful of the sisters of charity in our town; it visits with noiseless step the cheerless house of want, and kindly smooths the pillow of sickness and sorrow.”[8]

Health reform and its leading component in the nineteenth century, temperance, were especially popular outlets for women’s work outside the home. One-fourth of the members of the American Physiological Society—the first of many health reform associations formed in 1837—were women.[9] In particular, nursing a family member was considered one of the most important functions of a woman at the time, despite the fact that “her own health was probably, although regrettably, delicate.”[10] Within her own family, White played this role as a wife and mother, nursing James White and two of her sons through illness.  The importance of women’s role in health reform is indicated by the title of White’s first volume on the subject: An Appeal to Mothers [emphasis added].

In addition, hydropathy was especially appealing to women. It gave women an active role by offering improved health through easily implemented changes personal habits—thus women became “self-doctorers.” Women’s role in home health care was also recognized, and therefore they were seen as central in the campaign to reform American living habits. Women did not practice the water cure exclusively at home, however, but were also practitioners at water cure facilities. The early 1850s graduating classes of the American Hydropathtic Institute in New York City were about equally divided between men and women. The argument for female practitioners rested on the “the complementary nature of women’s character with healing,” and also allowed for same-sex attendants.[11] White embraced the use of female practitioners, administering the water cure herself to neighbors and friends in her hometown of Battle Creek.

White’s personal experiences with illness correlated with and informed the health commands she delivered through visions. In January of 1863, White read an article published by James Caleb Jackson on diphtheria. There was an epidemic of the illness at the time, which two of White’s sons happened to be suffering from. White’s children recovered after she used the simple water treatments described in the article.[12] It was reprinted in the February 17, 1863 issue of the Review and Herald.[13] The article by Dr. Jackson also spelled out the basic principles of health reform.

During the winter of 1863-64 two of White’s sons had critical cases of pneumonia. A physician treated her eldest son Henry. He died of the disease at age 16. Not too long after this, White’s son Willie caught what was then called lung fever. The Whites, rather than consulting a physician, administered water treatments and prayed for him. After a week of illness, Willie recovered. White later wrote that she had an inspired dream while Willie was sick that drugs were harmful. These two experiences with her children informed White’s belief that the water cure was superior to the practices of physicians.[14]  She claimed divine endorsement for the type of therapy that she found most successful in her own life.

Throughout the spring of 1863 James White wrote articles and included excerpts from publications extolling the hygienic living health reform guidelines in the Review and Herald. Thus, long before White’s June 1863 vision, the Seventh-day Adventists had already heard of the health reform message. However, the health crusade that had begun received divine approval when White had her first health vision June 5, 1863. Though it was not published until fifteen months later, in August 1864, it recites what were at the time the established principles of health reform, though they were attributed to her recent vision.

White’s prophecy was largely responsible for changing the eating habits of Seventh-day Adventists. The Review and Herald continued to publish articles and excerpts from leading health reformers to help Adventists take the transition to the new prescriptions of health reform. Though not all aspects of health reform were uniformly embraced, “for most Adventists, acceptance of health reform meant principally three things: a vegetarian diet, two meals a day, and no drugs or stimulants.”[15] This was true of the White household itself; by 1864 she wrote that she had abolished meat from her diet and was down to two meals a day. White also reported that this regimen improved her own health.[16]

In autumn of 1864, the Whites decided to visit Dr. Jackson’s water cure resort for themselves. Dr. Jackson’s had established “Our Home on the Hillside” in Dansville, New York in October of 1858. The basic principles of health reform and hydropathy governed the daily life of residents. All of the women wore the “American Costume,” a dress and trousers outfit modeled on the famous so-called Bloomer costume. The food served was vegetarian; meat, butter, tea and coffee were forbidden. Two meals were served a day: breakfast in the morning, and dinner in the afternoon, and residents spent their time partaking in water treatments and simple exercises. Drugs and medicine were also expressly forbidden.

The Whites were kept company by at least seven other Seventh-day Adventists at Our Home at the time. They stayed for three weeks, during which time the American costume of short skirts over pants particularly enraptured White. After their stay, the Whites began to travel, preaching the message of health reform. When at home in Battle Creek, White began to administer hydrotherapy treatments herself, though she already had plans to establish a sanitarium where Seventh-day Adventists could come to receive such treatments. The Whites soon returned to Danesville, as James White had suffered a stroke in the summer of 1865, and by September White was no longer able to care for him by herself. Upon their return to Our Home, the Whites settled into the Dansville routine. White was not only caretaker for her husband, but received treatments herself and took to nursing duties, making beds and tidying rooms for other ministers. However, this longer stay at Our Home revealed disagreements between White and Dr. Jackson, especially on theological matters. She wrote that despite “the kind attention and respect” she had received at Our Home, “the sophistry of the devil” prevailed in Dansville.[17] The Whites left Our Home in December of 1865 to stay with friends in Rochester.[18]

It was in Rochester, on Christmas Eve, that White had a seminal vision. In it, she not only saw that her husband would recover, but received a calling for what might be White’s most enduring contribution to health reform and the Seventh-day Adventists Church. Adventists were to “have an institution of their own, under their own control, for the benefit of the diseased and suffering among us, who wish to have health and strength that they may glorify God in their bodies and spirits which are his.”[19] At the annual General Conference session in May 1866, White announced the commandment from her vision to build an Adventist water cure. As a result, the Western Health Reform Institute was established in Battle Creek, and opened its doors September 5, 1866. Support and enthusiasm for the institute was widespread, especially as many church leaders had, like White, stayed at Our Home in Dansville, on which the institute was clearly modeled. Prompted by White’s vision, the Western Health Reform Institute became “the first link in what was to become a worldwide chain of Seventh-day Adventist medical institutions.”[20] In keeping with the benevolent underpinnings of health reform work, the institute took in charity patients, at one point facing insolvency because of how few paying patrons it housed.[21]

The benevolent underpinnings of this health reform work helped the church respond to charges that the establishment of permanent medical facility, like the institutionalization of the church, was a heavy investment in this world and therefore “a denial of our faith in the speedy coming of Christ.”[22] The Western Health Reform Institute, and the medical centers that followed, were framed as a means of evangelism, spreading the “present truth.” Church leaders used the pages of the Review and Herald to make this clear, as it was also made clear by White’s prophecy.[23] In this way, the benevolent health reform undertaken by the church was explicitly linked to the Church’s millennial message and theology: the creation of their benevolent millennialism.

White’s writing and prophecy shaped the direction of the church, so much so that when church leaders wanted to expand the successful Institute, they saw a public endorsement from White as necessary to gain the needed investment. Uriah Smith, then editor of the Review and Herald, wrote White in 1867 asking for a public endorsement, as  “a great many are waiting before doing anything to help the Institute, till they see the Testimony [White’s forthcoming publication].”[24] White answered their appeal for assistance, and wrote in her response letter to Smith that she had received a vision that the institute was “a worthy enterprise for God’s people to engage in, one in which they can invest means to his glory and the advancement of his cause.”[25] She also reaffirmed her support for health reform work more generally, writing that it was as “closely connected with the present truth as the arm is connected with the body.”[26]

However, her position quickly shifted. Only months after issuing her statements of support, including the account of her vision, she published another volume saying the Lord had shown her that the institute should be “small at its commencement and cautiously increased, as good physicians and helpers could be procured and means raised.” White blamed Uriah Smith for the repudiation of the divinely inspired testimony she had published months earlier, while also refusing to withdraw any of her earlier writing. This contradiction, and her admittance to acting under Smith’s pressure raised “long-lasting questions about her susceptibility to human influences.”[27]

Such questions about the role of human influences had already come up regarding her health reform work. Since her first speeches and writings on the subject, White had insisted her views “were written independent of books or of the opinion of others.”[28] Despite White’s claim that the health reforms she advocated were based on personal experience and edicts she received through divine inspiration, they clearly drew on the work of health reformers who had become increasingly active and competent in nineteenth century America. She was so often questioned about her knowledge of Dr. Jackson and other health reformer’s writings that she ultimately issued a formal statement in the Review and Herald “disclaiming any familiarity with health-reform publications prior to receiving and writing out her vision.” However, this is clearly not the case, given the publication of articles in the Review and Herald, which White certainly read or of which she was aware, on health reform, in addition to the fact that she had read Dr. Jackson’s January 1863 article on diphtheria. Ronald Numbers, in his book on White’s health prophecy, has extensively documented that this was not the case. He points out plagiaristic parallels between the writings of leading health reformers White’s writing to evidence this claim. In addition, he cites correspondence between the Whites and Dr. Jackson that demonstrates the White family received books from Dr. Jackson in August 1863 and that at least James White had read them by December of that year.[29]

White negotiated and shifted her positions over time in response to the reaction within the church, especially with regards to certain dietary restrictions and particularly the issue of dress reform. In terms of dietary restrictions, White’s commitment to temperance and abstinence from other stimulating substances such as tobacco and coffee remained, while her commitment to vegetarianism had dropped off by the mid-1870s, only to resurge in the new century, at which point it “was more the exception than the rule in Adventist households.”[30]

However, it was in dress reform that White most definitively changed her position, and it is perhaps especially revealing about the precarious nature of White’s leadership given the gendered nature of the issue. Dress reform had always been one of the more controversial aspects of the health reform message, though it was an important aspect for many reformers. Graham himself had advocated against wearing corsets and other tight costumes. The Bloomer costume had actually been designed in a hydropathic institution, modeled after “the wet dress, a gown with extra wide sleeves which was dipped in cold water before being put on.”[31]

White seemed predisposed to an interest in dress reform. She had always dressed simply, and believed modesty in dress was an important religious tenement. She recounted her faith being shaken the day she was baptized in the Methodist church, when her minister failed to admonish a fellow candidate for her ornate adornments, which White felt were a “display of vanity in one who professed to be a follower of the meek and lowly Jesus.”[32] Despite this, and the fact that she supported most other tenants of health reform, White had actually initially opposed dress reform, writing in 1863 “God would not have his people adopt the so-called reform dress.”[33]

It was her trip to Dansville that changed her mind, and created an association between not only dress and morality, but also dress and health. At Dansville, women’s clothing received special attention. Dr. Jackson and his colleagues designed their own “American costume,” a dress and trouser outfit modeled on the famous so-called Bloomer costume. White decided to support a modified version of the American costume with a longer skirt. She herself, however, only wore the costume intermittently in late 1865 and early 1866, careful to avoid wearing it in situations where it might cause controversy. However, the opening of the Western Health Reform Institute forced her to take a stronger stance. Since her directions regarding health reform in her 1865 publication How to Live were the directives under which the institute was run, patients were urged to wear the reform dress. Some Adventists, however, understandably pointed to White’s earlier writing that condemned the reform dress and questioned this practice. Again, the contradiction in White’s vision put her authority at stake. She published another volume that attempted to reconcile the two positions; essential to her position was distinguishing between the American costume and that which she advocated in How to Live. The former was too short, and this is what she had cautioned Adventists against adopting in her initial writings; the latter was the acceptable and encouraged dress. In addition, White reasserted her authority as prophet: “I am the best judge of the things which have been presented before me in vision; and none need fear that I shall by my life contradict my own testimony, or that I shall fail to notice any real contradiction in the views given me.”[34]

Having successfully navigated her way out of this controversy, White enthusiastically took up the cause of dress reform. “God would now have his people adopt the reform dress,” she wrote, and she set out to ensure that they did so.[35] She set a standard for what was appropriate—skirts should be nine inches above the floor—and began peddling patterns as she traveled to churches. In 1869 the General Conference officially endorsed the dress standards that White had laid out.[36]

Dress reform never received a wide following among the Adventist membership however. Like many dress reformers who also considered themselves health reformers, White struggled to legitimize this more rational way of dressing, which “numerous women testified . . . improved their health and saved their lives.”[37] Despite the good intentions of White’s advocacy for dress reform, in that she was not attempting to challenge gender norms or attack women’s virtue, wearing bloomers, or any other similar costume, was considered fanatical.[38] This was in part due to its association with early feminists such as Sarah and Angelina Grimke, Lucy Stone, Susan B. Anthony, Elizabeth Cady Stanton and other women’s rights advocates who “eagerly adopted the Bloomer as their distinctive uniform.”[39] Distancing himself from this association is perhaps why Dr. Jackson renamed the costume worn by women at Our Home in Dansville the “American costume,” though it appears indistinguishable from the Bloomer costume. This association with fanaticism is also perhaps the reason for White’s initial opposition. She had learned the dangers of being associated with fanatics from her association with spirtualizers in the late 1840s. But even the feminists, including the leaders: Stanton, Stone and the Grimkes, abandoned dress reform, given the overwhelmingly hostile response from the press and negative associations with dress reform. Indeed, the demise of the National Dress Reform Association came in 1865, just as White was enthusiastically taking up the cause.[40] This hostile response from most was also too much for even those Adventist women willing to try the reform dress, who were few and far between—further exacerbating the situation. By 1875, White had given up on dress reform within the Adventist church, personally abandoning the costume as well.[41] White had a vision on January 3, 1875 in which she saw dress reform had become “an injury to the cause of truth” and testimony calling for the adoption of dress reform was now “to become silent.”[42] Without contradicting her earlier divinely inspired testimony in favor of dress reform, she was able to abandon the cause. From then on, White simply advocated that Adventist women “dress plainly, as many do, having the dress of good material, durable, modest, appropriate for this age, and let not the dress question fill the mind.”[43] Though dress reform historian Gayle V. Fischer allows that “the Seventh-day Adventists were successful in combining health and religion in their theology . . . encouraging women to wear trousers was one of their least productive experiments.”[44]

White’s most strident and enduring commitment with regard to her health reform message was temperance; as Numbers writes, “temperance was her favorite theme, and she happily accepted the many speaking invitations that came her way.” Throughout the 1870s, she spoke to audiences of thousands on temperance; her greatest triumph in this matter was lecturing on temperance at a gathering of 20,000 at a camp meeting in Massachusetts in September 1876. She also regularly wrote articles on temperance for Adventist publications. The Adventist commitment to temperance was institutionalized in 1879 with the formation of the American Health and Temperance Association. As she traveled, White actively recruited Adventists to sign a teetotal pledge, which included abstinence from tea coffee, opium and all other narcotics and stimulants, or a less comprehensive anti-liquor and tobacco pledge.[45]

Despite White’s unacknowledged debt to the health reformers whose teachings she drew on, and her later retraction of certain aspects of her health reform message, the Seventh-day Adventist Church retained a commitment to health work as a whole. White and the Church remained committed to core aspects of health reform, and by the early 1870s the financial outlook of both the Western Health Reform Institute were bright. In 1875 John Kellogg joined the staff of the Western Health Reform Institute. While hydropathy had rejected many of the valid practices in traditional medicine, Kellogg worked with the Whites to turn the institute into a scientifically respectable institution where a wide variety of medical and surgical techniques were used. White was willing to do this in order to “prove her detractors wrong and bring fame and honor to Seventh-day Adventists.”[46] By the Spring of 1878 a new Medical and Surgical Sanitarium stood on the old institute grounds. Though White had originally supported this recasting of the institution, she now felt the building was more like “a grand hotel rather than an institution for the treatment of the sick.”[47] Kellogg responded by working with the White’s rivals to force them off the board of the sanitarium in 1880. The sanitarium continued in success; the medical director of Johns Hopkins University Hospital praised Kellogg for “having converted into a scientific institution an establishment founded on a vision.”[48] Kellogg, still a practicing Adventist, continued to give credit to this vision, characterizing White as the institution’s “real founder and chief promoter.”[49]

Kellogg had ascended to the leadership of the church’s health reform work—he was also president of American Health and Temperance Association. Not long after the Whites were removed from the sanitarium’s board, James White passed away: a severe and tragic loss for White whose work and prophecy had been supported and promulgated by her husband, and a loss for the church as well, as it was his efforts that created and led the church’s organization. White’s work, then, underwent another shift. She began to lend her assistance to the Adventist’s global missionary efforts, and “literally followed the spread of Adventism around the world.”[50] White and her husband had in fact already begun spending much of their time in the western United States in the 1870s, assisting with proselytizing, and so global travel, in a way, was a natural extension of White’s continued westward movement. The spread of Adventism country and worldwide followed similar patterns: an Adventist leader relocated as a missionary, found a publication, and set up centrally located headquarters. It was at this point, when churches had been somewhat established, that White traveled to the newly established branch of Adventism. Like early Methodist women, White “broke down the barriers between “public” and “private” by making the world [her] household”— quite literally, given her international travels.[51] Her first trip was to Switzerland in 1884; she spent the following three years traveling across Europe. During this time, “the thrill of sightseeing and speaking in new places tended to divert Mrs. White’s attention from health reform.”[52] However, after some time back in the United States, she went to Australia and New Zealand in 1891, and here she continued her health reform work. White realized that health reform was benevolence and evangelism combined.[53] As she wrote in 1900, it was “an entering wedge, making a way for other truths to reach the heart.”[54]

In 1900 White returned to the United States. Rather than retiring, she continued to work, writing extensively. As Butler explains, “the role of prophet offered her a culturally defined way to speak and to write, relieving her illnesses rather than aggravating them.”[55] She compiled a volume on Christian Temperance from her previously published writings in 1890, and published The Ministry of Healing, another major work on health, in 1905. She also helped to establish other medical centers near major cities, including ones near Washington, Chicago, Boston and Nashville. She had moved to Southern California in 1900, and was especially involved in establishing sanitariums near San Diego and Los Angeles. Her assistance came not only in the form of endorsement and fundraising, but also in some cases a personal involvement in the staffing and function of the institutions. By 1915, there were 33 sanitariums and a number of smaller medical facilities associated with the Seventh-day Day Adventist Church across six continents.[56] Today, there are over 500 Adventists medical institutions worldwide.[57] Thus, health reform, informed and entrenched by White’s prophecy and writings, became a defining characteristic of the church. It is the importance of health work to the church and the fact that White was the leader and impetus for much of this work, that makes the description of the Seventh-day Adventist Church’s millennialism as “benevolent” appropriate.