The Critical Early Years, 1895—1924

In 1895 Harvey Lillard visited the offices of Daniel David Palmer. “D.D.,” as he is nearly always re­ferred to, had recently opened his practice in Daven­port, Iowa, after a varied career that included stints as a schoolmaster and grocery clerk.

Therapeutic manipulation was not unknown to late-nineteenth-century North Americans. They were aware of the long tradition of massage as a healing modality. Bohemian immigrants to the Mid­west practiced a special form of massage, napravit. Bonesetting, a form of manipulation involved primar­ily in treating orthopedic problems, had flourished in some areas. Finally, in Kirksville, Missouri, in 1874, Andrew Taylor Still had founded osteopathy, a school of healing that utilized spinal manipulation.

These diverse healing techniques shared more than their emphasis on manual manipulation. Dmgless healing was an important theme in many nonallopathic systems in the mid-nineteenth cen­tury. It was part of a larger response to the excesses of “heroic” therapies (i.e., vigorous cathartics, emet­ics, and bloodletting) and in fact, mid- and Iate- nineteenth-century healers, both inside and outside the medical profession, increasingly began to empha­size milder interventions. They shared a growing recognition that the worth of many conventional remedies had never been scientifically proved and placed a new emphasis on the healing power of na­ture. Their skepticism about heroic medicine was epitomized by the words of Oliver Wendell Holmes when he proclaimed in 1860 that, with the exception of a few specific remedies, “if the whole materia medica, as now used, could be sunk to the bottom of the sea, it would be all the better for mankind and all the worse for the fishes.”

Nonallopathic healers took advantage of this cli­mate arguing against any pharmacological therapy, and host of drugless alternatives developed, among them hydropathy, osteopathy, and magnetic healing.

Briefly stated, Palmer’s chiropractic fused mag­netic healing with therapeutic manipulation. Palmer believed that subluxations of the spinal column caused disease by impinging on the nervous system and inhibiting the flow of the body’s vital “fluid,” which Palmer called “innate intelligence”; disease resulted from either a deficiency or an excess of this fluid. By examining the patient’s spine, a chiroprac­tic could detect the malalignment responsible for the patient’s ailment, manually manipulate the verte­brae, and restore normal alignment, allowing the return of proper nervous function. Once the normal flow of “innate intelligence” resumed, the body’s in­ner healing powers ensured a return to health.

Palmer argued that his chiropractic approach of­fered the world an important new philosophy. He believed that God had created a balanced, ordered universe and that equilibrium was the fundamental organizing principle of life. “Innate intelligence” rep­resented God’s presence in human beings. Subluxa­tions created disequilibrium, and the inevitable se­quela of this violation of natural law was disease.

Palmer’s vision was consonant with cultural and intellectual assumptions that were prevalent in the United States at the turn of the century. It linked health care to a worldview in which God was benevo­lent and ruled the universe through natural laws. It emphasized that there should be no conflict between religion and science; science served religion by dem­onstrating the Creator’s natural laws.

This view of science was a critical component of chiropractic and contrasted sharply with the view of medicine’s new research elite. Increasingly secular, the science of medicine was located in university laboratories, required special training, and was based on a reductionist philosophy. Deductive reason­ing and the manipulation of nature in an experimen­tal setting were its hallmarks.

Chiropractic is the name of a systematized knowledge of the science of life... an explanation of the methods used to relieve humanity of suffering and the prolonging of life, thereby making this stage of existence much more effi­cient in its preparation for the next step, a life beyond.

Palmer believed that science ought to serve a subordi­nate and supportive role in relation to religion. A significant portion of U.S. society shared that view as the popularity of fundamentalism in the 1920s and the Scopes monkey trial dramatically demonstrated. Thus, the chiropractic approach to science remained a powerful model well into the twentieth century, with its legitimacy resting heavily on the assumption that science should reflect God’s grandeur.

Ironically, chiropractors also sought to benefit from the growing prestige of science. They deflected allopathic attacks on chiropractic as quackery by arguing that their system of healing was a truly scientific way of dealing with disease. In fact, they even launched their own offensive by ridiculing phy­sicians for adopting a scientific approach that epito­mized the corrupt “atheistic materialism” that was destroying the United States.

Their efforts to reconcile science and religion by emphasizing the primacy of God attracted support at a time when the appropriate relationship between science and religion was hotly contested. They ar­gued that by using drugs and surgery as therapies, and by failing to appreciate the importance of the spiritual in health and disease, physicians rejected the healing power of nature, and implicitly rejected the beneficence and wisdom of God Himself.

Chiropractic’s appeal extended beyond the scien­tific and philosophical. Important tum-of-the-cen- tury social and political themes also reverberated in the chiropractic literature. Chiropractors repeatedly characterized the AMA as a trust, invoking a famil­iar and powerful image central to this era of reform. They pointed to the growing public health movement as an indication that medicine, like all trusts, ma­nipulated government to its own profit. Compulsory allopathic examination of schoolchildren and the armed forces’ refusal to use nonallopathic healers, they contended, demonstrated the power of medicine over government.

Like all trusts, medicine was ruled by a narrow circle of conspirators. It was not the trustworthy, rural general practitioners who were responsible for medicine’s monopolistic excesses; they too were be­ing duped by a small group of eastern, elite intellec­tuals. This argument sought to capitalize on the disgruntlement of those physicians who resented the AMA’s increasing emphasis on research science. Fur­thermore, it allowed individuals to condemn the medical profession but to retain confidence in their personal physician.

Chiropractors accused medicine of dominating the media, another characteristic of monopolies. They cited AMA boycotts of newspapers that con­tained “quack” advertisements and the explosive increase in the number of press releases by physi­cians’ organizations.

The chiropractic solution to the problem of the medical trust was simple: open competition. The United States was built on rugged individualism. The merit of each practitioner and each healing profession should be established solely by a jury of patients.

Although necessary, the congruence of chiroprac­tic’s social, political, cultural, and scientific appeals with early-twentieth-century beliefs was not suffi­cient to ensure the system’s survival. To be success­ful, chiropractic needed more than a coherent mes­sage; it needed a leader. The man who responded to this need was Bartlett Joshua Palmer.

B.J., as he is invariably referred to, was D. D. Palmer’s son. When the elder Palmer was jailed in 1906 for violating the medical practice law, B.J. took over the reigns of the Palmer School of Chiropractic (P.S.C.). Under his charismatic leadership both the school in Davenport, Iowa, and the general focus of chiropractic expanded enormously. B.J. began to market this system of healing aggressively, and en­rollment at the P.S.C. increased from a trickle, to a stream, to a flood. There had been a total of 15 graduates in the decade before B.J. inherited the school. Starting in 1921 the P.S.C. graduated more than 1,000 students per year. Although the number of graduates soon declined into the hundreds, the Palmer School remained a major chiropractic institu­tion throughout B.J.’s career.

B.J. did not limit his efforts to the development of the P.S.C. He tirelessly proselytized for all of chiro­practic. Establishing a printing office at the Palmer School, he turned out a flood of chiropractic litera­ture. He opened one of the first radio stations in Iowa, over whose powerful airways he proclaimed the bene­fits Ofchiropractic healing. B. J. went on lecture tours, organized the Universal Chiropractors Association, lobbied legislators, and appeared at trials. A nearly cultlike atmosphere developed around him and few could be neutral about the man. Nonetheless, B.J.’s forceful advocacy Ofchiropractic created more public­ity, which was necessary to the development of the field. Indeed, it began to flourish as his efforts com­bined this system of healing with a philosophy of health and disease that resonated with important concerns for many North Americans. The growing influence of chiropractic arguments and chiroprac­tors is suggested by their ability to convince legisla­tors that chiropractors deserved licensure. In 1913 Kansas passed the first law recognizing chiroprac­tors, and several other states in the Midwest soon did the same. By the 1930s, despite vigorous medical opposition, chiropractors had obtained some form of legal recognition in 32 states. Despite the skepticism and outright hostility of physicians, millions of North Americans were consulting chiropractors.