Natural Health the Cheap and Easy Way, Continued

Explanatory note: This article was cut from my Women's History Month piece, which discusses the contributions to American history Ellen White made as an author (and as an early "superwoman").

6. Mrs. White recommended exposure to sunshine. This being the nineteenth century, she didn't try to convince people that Caucasian skin looked better with a bit of sun tan. She could hardly have anticipated an era when people would lie on the sand in bikinis and risk exposure to too much sunshine. Her audience were proud of being pale.

Mrs. White did, however, persuade people that houses would actually be cleaner and more pleasant if curtains were opened, and rugs and furniture received a bit of sunshine. We may never know how many people came to the sanitariums with "consumption" that was actually caused by inhaling mold spores in musty, sunless Victorian parlors. Meanwhile, just exposing their bare hands to the sunbeam in a window was enough to alleviate the Vitamin D deficiencies that disfigured many nineteenth-century Americans.

7. Mrs. White was among the first of several Americans who recognized the health benefits of being outdoors. She was hardly the most outspoken or radical advocate of fresh air, in between Henry David Thoreau and Theodore Roosevelt, but she was one of that crowd.

8. Mrs. White recommended exercise. At a time when most North Americans aspired to be able to hire other people to do chores like chopping wood, scrubbing clothes on a washboard, weeding and hoeing vegetables, and beating the dust out of rugs, Ellen White advocated these forms of exercise as healthy alternatives to frivolous, dangerous "sports." Schools organized by Ellen White scheduled time for physical education...in the form of weeding, hoeing, and watering vegetable gardens!

Ellen White's childhood illness, and lifelong disfigurement, had begun on a school playground where other children were running and throwing things back and forth, and a rock hit her face. Mrs. White never really liked the idea of children playing games that involved running and throwing. She preferred to see them doing "useful work" for exercise.