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Understanding Ellen White - Contents
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    Statement 1: Dangerous wigs

    “Fashion loads the heads of women with artificial braids and pads, which do not add to their beauty, but give an unnatural shape to the head Artificial hair and pads covering the base of the brain, heat and excite the spinal nerves producing congestion” in the brain, loss of natural hair, and even insanity. 9EGW, Health Reformer, October 1, 1871. Wigs in 1871 were constructed of heavy materials—natural hair, cotton, sea grass, wool, Spanish moss, jute, and so on. When they bound the head too tightly, according to a physician cited in the article, they confined heat in the head, trapped perspiration, and hindered blood circulation to the brain. This physician advised against wearing “switches, or jutes, or chignons, because they breed pestiferous vermin, whose life is fed by their drain on the small blood-vessels of the scalp” 10Ibid. The physician believed that the tight-fitting, heat-confining construction of the wig was a greater hazard to health than the possibility of insects. 11Ibid. Another hazard was human hair harvested from plague victims in China, then manufactured into hairpieces. 12“The False Hair Industry” The Watchman, August 1910, 503, 504. Whatever the level of precision in the physician’s reports that Ellen White quoted, her instruction to avoid such wigs appears to have been good advice. 13Earlier that year the Health Reformer reported an incident of a woman who wore a jute wig and experienced burrowing parasites in her scalp, citing the Marshall Statesman and the Springfield (Mass.) Republican (Health Reformer, January 1, 1871).UEGW 182.1

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