PROPHETESS OF HEALTH: Ellen G. White

Nineteenth-century America spawned a remarkable number of religious sects, notably Joseph Smith's Mormons, Mary Baker Eddy's Christian Scientists, Charles Taze Russell's Jehovah's Witnesses, and Ellen G. White's Seventh-Day Adventists. This straightforward biographical account, by a sympathetic medical historian, of Mrs. White's development as a religious leader and as a health reformer is the first aimed at the general reader. Her delicate constitution and extreme religious sensibility (her teachings were based on lifelong visions) spurred a consuming quest for both physical and spiritual health, leading to the joint proclamation of natural and divine laws. Her followers now number two ion, and her championing of temperance, sexual restraint, natural medicine, and health food probably has residual effects, for good and ill, even today. But Numbers' treatment of her life is insufficiently probing to interest more than those now committed to her various causes or curious about this animated period in American religious and medical history.