Ellen G. White, Seventh-day Adventist prophetess, ranks with the Mormon Joseph Smith, the Christian Scientist Mary Baker Eddy, and Charles Taze Russell of the Jehovah's Witnesses as one of four 19th-century founders of a major American religious sect. Yet, outside her own church of 2.5 million members, she is probably the least known. Her comparatively unsensational life and her church's reticence to expose her private papers to the scrutiny of critical scholars have contributed to this undeserved obscurity. By her death in 1915 she had founded one of the nation's largest indigenous denominations, created a string of sanitariums and hospitals stretching from Scandinavia to the South Pacific, and inspired an educational system without peer in the Protestant world today. She had traveled widely, lectured extensively, and written dozens of books on a variety of subjects. Few contemporaries, male or female, accomplished more. - Preface.