Ellen White e a psicologia nos jornais The Health Reformer e Good Health

Abstract

This work consists of a survey on the presence of Psychology in articles published by Ellen Gould Harmon White (1927 – 1915) in The Health Reformer and Good Health journal. Ellen White was an American writer well known for her vast bibliographic production and also for being the founder of the Seventh-day Adventist Church in the United States. Throughout her career she published around 100,000 pages between books and articles published in journals, such as The Health Reformer and Good Health, which are the primary sources of this thesis. Through a careful review we managed to observe the frequency with which Ellen referred to topics such as the medicine of the time, health, religion and, mainly, Psychology. Access to the aforementioned newspapers was made possible through two websites – https://encyclopedia.adventist.org/ and https://ellenwhite.org/. The former gives access to all digitized editions of both newspapers and the ladder gives the transcription of the articles published by Ellen White only. It should be mentioned that in these links, it is possible to access other newspapers where Ellen White published, such as the Signs of The Times, The Advent Review and Sabbath Herald among others. For this thesis we selected The Health Reformer and Good Health because of their aim at the theme of health having the general population as their target and also because of the nealy hundred articles published by Ellen White having Psychology as a subject or themes that today are identified as Psychology matters. For example, on November 1, 1871, we located an article by Ellen White entitled “Words to christian mothers. On the subject of life, and happiness”, where she considered that the proper functioning of the brain stems from a balanced blood circulation throughout the body. Our attention was drawn to the way Ellen White referred to Psychology, weaving relationships with other areas of knowledge, such as medicine and especially theology. In this regard, when discussing Psychology, Ellen White resorted to her own religious belief that, in a way, permeated the discussions she raised around Psychology through two approaches, organic and psychosocial. For better understanding of the content of the articles she published we surveyed them and transcribed the main excerpts. For this purpose we also developed a biography about Ellen White that points out other events in her life that are usually overshadowed by her religious experience as a writer and founder of the SDA.