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Ronald L. Numbers, Prophetess of Health: A Study of Ellen G. White, 3rd ed. Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 2008. Pp. xxxiv + 417. $33.00.
In 1976, Harper and Row published the first edition of Prophetess of Health: A Study of Ellen G. White, an examination of the "prophet" who co-founded the Seventh-day Adventist Church, thereby causing an uproar in the denomination that caught the attention of Time. Sixteen years later, University of Tennessee Press published a second edition of the book, with a new preface by Ronald Numbers, an introduction by Jonathan Butler (that narrated the controversy that arose over the volume both before and after publication), a psychological profile of Ellen White by Numbers and his wife, Janet, and a chronological rendering, in White's own words, of her "Physical and Psychological Experiences." Now Eerdmans, which had rejected the manuscript before its first publication, has produced a third edition that includes all of the second edition's elements. It also has a new preface by Numbers (that briefly discusses the past thirty years of historiography on Ellen White) and new appendices (a newspaper account of the 1845 Israel Dammon trial that reveals...