Response to Compass claims

September 1, 2004

Seventh-day Adventist leaders have responded to claims the visions of one of the church's founders, Ellen White, were the result of temporal lobe epilepsy.

"The claim is well over 100 years old," says Dr Lester Devine, the director of the Ellen G White Seventh-day Adventist Research Centre. "And the incident [Ellen White, nine at the time, lay in a stupor for three weeks after a classmate hit her in the face with a stone] is even older. It's difficult to analyse a person's medical condition more than 150 years after the event."

Dr Devine's comments come in response to a story on ABC TV's Compass program on August 29. The story posed the question, "Is the human brain hard-wired for God?" and examined neurological evidence for the so-called "religious impulse."

Dr Merlin Burt, branch director of the Ellen G White Estate at Andrews University, and Dr Daniel Giang, associate professor of neurology at Loma Linda University Medical Center, appeared in the story giving the church's view.

"The description of Ellen White's state in vision does not fit with the description of the medical condition," says Dr Percy Harrold, associate director of Adventist Health for the church in the South Pacific. "Seizures never enhance a person's mental abilities. A successful person with epilepsy is successful in spite of the disease, not because of it."

The research centre has copies of the article, "Visions or seizures: Was Ellen White the victim of epilepsy?" by Dr Donald Peterson, a professor of neurology at Loma Linda. Contact the centre by email (egwrc@avondale.edu.au) or phone (+61 2 4980 2139) to obtain the article.

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