Bleeding Into the Throat While Unconscious

Ellen White states that her recovery from her accident was considered to be “very doubtful” due to loss of “so much blood.” ^{12Testimonies for the Church 1:11.} That this loss of blood must have been considerable is borne out by the fact that when she regained consciousness her “garments were covered with blood, which was pouring from [her] nose and streaming over the floor” and the fact that when she tried to walk, she “grew faint and dizzy” and had to be carried home by her sister and her schoolmate. ^{13Testimonies for the Church 1:10.}ViOSe 12.2

Physicians generally recognize that profuse bleeding into the throat, during even a brief period of unconsciousness, can result in pneumonia. For this reason one of the first concerns in the treatment of a patient with a head injury such as Ellen sustained is not the immediate effect of the head injury, but the maintaining of adequate respiration and preventing the aspiration of blood and secretions from the nose and throat into the bronchi and lungs. If these precautions are not taken, serious complications may occur. This was especially true in Ellen’s day before the discovery of antibiotics.ViOSe 12.3

If, while she was unconscious, Ellen aspirated blood and secretions from her nose and throat (not an unlikely possibility, given the lack of adequate first aid knowledge in those days), she probably contracted pneumonia. Thus blood loss and pneumonia, not severe brain injury, is the more reasonable explanation of what she referred to as “my sickness.”ViOSe 13.1

Tuberculosis was common in Ellen White’s day, and many people had an inactive form of this disease, which would flare up and become active pulmonary tuberculosis if some other illness or even some unusual stress occurred.ViOSe 13.2

If Ellen had inactive tuberculosis at the time of her injury, blood loss and pneumonia could easily have developed into pulmonary tuberculosis. This would explain why she says that as a young woman her lungs were diseased ^{14Life Sketches of Ellen G. White, 72.} and why one physician diagnosed her as having “dropsical consumption” ^{15Gifts, vol. 2, p. 30. Cf. James White in Life incidents, in Connection With the Great Advent Movement, as Illustrated by the Three Angels of Revelation XVI (Battle Creek, Mich.: Seventh-day Adventist Publishing Association, 1868), p. 273, says that “when she had her first vision she was an emaciated invalid given up by her friends and physicians to die of consumption.”}—a nineteenth century term for tuberculosis.ViOSe 13.3