The Religion of Chiropractic

Populist Healing from the American Heartland

Holly Folk

• Publisher: The University of North Carolina Press
• Year: 2017
• ISBN:
  9781469632803
• Topic: Medicine
• Subtopic: Alternative & Complementary Medicine

Chiropractic is by far the most common form of alternative medicine in the United States today, but its fascinating origins stretch back to the battles between science and religion in the nineteenth century. At the center of the story are chiropractic's colorful founders, D. D. Palmer and his son, B. J. Palmer, of Davenport, Iowa, where in 1897 they established the Palmer College of Chiropractic. Holly Folk shows how the Palmers' system depicted chiropractic as a conduit for both material and spiritualized versions of a "vital principle, " reflecting popular contemporary therapies and nineteenth-century metaphysical beliefs, including the idea that the spine was home to occult forces. The creation of chiropractic, and other Progressive-era versions of alternative medicine, happened at a time when the relationship between science and religion took on an urgent, increasingly competitive tinge. Many remarkable people, including the Palmers, undertook highly personal reinterpretations of their physical and spiritual worlds. In this context, Folk reframes alternative medicine and spirituality as a type of populist intellectual culture in which ideologies about the body comprise a highly appealing form of cultural resistance.

Chapter One: The First Adjustment

Not a chiropractic seminar goes by without the phrase. It’s as if there is some unspoken rule that at some point, or several in some cases, that it must be uttered. The phrase of course is, “Tell the Story.”

—Steve Tullius, DC

WHAT IS CHIROPRACTIC?

A person seeking treatment for the first time is quite likely to be suffering from back pain. Chiropractors maintain the practice can help many conditions, but spinal and musculoskeletal problems are patients’ primary reasons for initial visits. A patient’s first impressions draw comparisons to a new patient visit with a physician. Though as likely to be located in a shopping center as a medical office park, the chiropractor’s office will resemble that of a medical doctor. After being escorted from the waiting area into the examining room, a patient is asked to complete a health-history questionnaire. The patient might be impressed by the level of detail devoted to the “intake,” and may also find the “bedside manner” of the chiropractor more caring and congenial than many medical practitioners. With the help of an assistant, the chiropractor will conduct both a general physical exam and a survey of the spinal column. Posture and patterns of mobility in activities like walking will be evaluated. Suffering from back trouble, the patient may be surprised to see so much attention given to the neck. It is quite likely a series of x-rays will be taken.

The chiropractor then will present the findings to the patient: pointing out misalignments of vertebrae and explaining their effect on soft tissues, and recommending a course of treatment. There is a good possibility the chiropractor will explain that the word “chiropractic” means “done by hand” or even “hand-fixing.” Indeed, physical touch is the basis for the system. Treatment is likely to include some form of “spinal manipulation” described to the patient as a “chiropractic adjustment.” The chiropractor will press or push on various points on the spinal column, and will pull, twist, and rotate the limbs and torso, sometimes using the entire body for leverage. Chiropractic can be a vigorous, forceful experience, with jarring thrusts and the disconcerting sound of “popping” vertebrae. Some chiropractors use a spring-loaded device, as small as a fountain pen, to deliver a concentrated force to a targeted region. Patients will hear this more gentle treatment described as “Activator Technique.” Chiropractic has many forms, from hard to soft, and with different underlying theories. The phenomenon of technique-patenting has led to an almost infinite variety of branded systems. Some of the best known include Basic, Axis-Only, Diversified, Activator, Sacro-Occipital and Gonstead (the last being most closely modeled on the techniques of D. D. Palmer).

Patients in acute pain, as many are, will be sent home with advice for palliative management—directions on activity, rest, ice or heat packs, and possibly a set of exercises intended to restore mobility. The chiropractor may recommend over-the-counter painkillers for pain management—or may warn against these vehemently. It is almost certain the patient will be advised to return for a follow-up visit. Over the next few days, the patient may find he or she really does feel better—often well enough to cancel the follow-up. Appointment reminders from office staff, and sometimes from the treating chiropractor, encourage new patients to return. The ones who do will have their progress monitored. The chiropractor will be sympathetic if the course of healing appears lengthy, and recommend a course of treatment for the ensuing weeks. If the pain has cleared up, the returning patient will be put on a schedule of “maintenance” and “preventative” chiropractic care.

After the office visit, the patient may wonder about what the chiropractor said and did. Exactly what is a “subluxation”? What is so special about the chiropractic “wellness paradigm”? And why, if one’s lower back is hurting, would the adjustment be on one’s neck? To really understand chiropractic is to know its origins, terminology, scientific theory and therapeutic logic in the way that chiropractors themselves do. Among other things, it is to learn the story chiropractors tell about their history. But what are the true origins of chiropractic? What is the beginning of the “chiropractic story”? And what bearing does it have on the contemporary practice?

THE BIRTH OF CHIROPRACTIC

The “discovery” of chiropractic has become a core foundation myth for the profession. Several versions circulate in chiropractic histories and original sources, but the basic story stays the same.¹ It begins in Davenport, Iowa, a prosperous town on the Mississippi River, where a Canadian immigrant named Daniel David Palmer was operating a successful “magnetic healing” practice in a downtown office building. At some point in the fall of 1895, D. D. had a friendly conversation with the custodian, Harvey Lillard. They must have spoken loudly, because according to the story, eighteen years prior Lillard had lost nearly all his hearing at the precise moment that “something gave way” in his spine. Laughing over a joke, D. D. slapped Lillard heartily on the back, perhaps with the book he was carrying, after which, they maintained, Lillard’s previously impaired hearing was noticed to be somewhat improved. Several days later, Palmer began treating Lillard by pressing on his upper vertebrae, where he claimed to have noticed a protrusion—possibly a bone out of place. Eventually, in a moment of frustration, D. D. took an in-character swat at the bump, which “instantly gave way” beneath the force of the thrust. Lillard’s deafness was spontaneously gone.

In the story chiropractors tell about the roots of their profession, this incident prompted D. D. Palmer to begin studying the role of the spinal column in bodily health and illness, which led him to discover a healing practice that has changed the world. Those skeptical of the chiropractic profession doubt this rendition, and the miraculous quality of the “Lillard Incident” has led even chiropractic historians to see it as apocryphal, or at the very least, heavily embellished. For reasons that will be made clear, the Palmers were and are controversial figures in the chiropractic world. Some chiropractors prefer to downplay the Palmers’ contributions or reject them outright, while others, known as “Super Straights,” accept the Palmers’ theories in their entirety, and regard the founders with reverence. Regardless of their esteem for the Palmers, the Lillard Incident is the story chiropractors use most often to note the beginning of their profession.

It is undisputed that at some point between 1895 and 1896, D. D. began to offer a drugless therapy, similar to magnetic healing, that he sought to distinguish as a new system. After D. D. cured the Rev. Samuel Henry Weed of “sciatic rheumatism,” the Presbyterian minister named the new treatment “chiropractic” to capture its essence as “hand-fixing.”² Over the next several years D. D. Palmer began to form a theory explaining the effectiveness of the new treatment. He soon was joined in this endeavor by his son, B. J., who in 1902 took over management of the fledgling Palmer School of Chiropractic, Davenport, where up until the 1970s three-quarters of American chiropractors earned their degrees.³ The Palmers were joined by allies and competitors, all eager to advance the new discovery. Chiropractic quickly became the most controversial “healing cult” (overtaking that honor from Christian Science), with the Palmers’ involvement being one of the main causes. Even so, these early chiropractic pioneers modeled a feistiness critical to the profession’s decades-long struggle for legitimacy. Today, chiropractic is the most patronized form of alternative medicine in America. By some estimates, more than 7 percent of the U.S. population, 22 million people, visit chiropractors every year.⁴

It makes sense that D. D. and B. J. Palmer should become hated and hagiographic figures. Like its predecessors, the contemporary chiropractic world is both emulative and rejecting of the establishment, and several scholars have noted the ongoing ambivalence about social status.⁵ The story of the “Discovery of Chiropractic” invokes classic populist and individualist ideals, and taps into Americans’ enduring fascination with a type of “great man”: the misunderstood genius, the “maverick,” lone inventor who makes a great contribution to humanity despite the skepticism of established authorities. Regardless of its literal truth, the “Chiropractic Story” is true in a mythic sense, and that may be more important. Positioning chiropractic as having a distinct origin, theory, and practice was crucial to the success of the early profession, because when chiropractic began to spread it was a close cousin in a family of very closely related systems of healing.

One of the difficulties in charting the history of chiropractic is that so much that is integral to its story happened long before D. D. Palmer struck Harvey Lillard between the shoulders. Sketching some broad historical developments will make my subsequent argument about chiropractic easier to follow. While the next few pages may seem to become a thicket of arcane medical knowledge and cranky social history, they are meant to carry the reader toward a central insight about chiropractic: that its therapeutic logic derives from ideas that were widely recognized in nineteenth-century alternative medicine, which itself had both a distinct intellectual inheritance and a specific social context of origin. There will be a lot of ground to cover to arrive at understanding why nineteenth-century American health culture was so receptive to the belief that one could cure illnesses by pressing or rubbing on the back. But I ask the reader to keep one point in mind: the healing movements of the nineteenth century were highly charged systems of belief in which science, religion, and political sentiment were fused together.

POPULAR PHYSIOLOGY: VITALIST AND POPULIST

D. D.’s amazing discovery happened in the 1890s, when Progressive Era health culture reflected the complexities of its historical moment.⁶ Studies on Progressive Era culture often frame it as a time of ambivalence and ambiguity: torn between optimism and cognitive dissonance, what we apprehend as “modernity” and something much older, certainty and a lack thereof, centripetal and centrifugal cultural forces. An array of social changes—industrialism, mass production, communications media, government and corporate bureaucracy, and economic and cultural displacement—converged to create a moment of heightened risk and opportunity for enterprising souls like D. D. Palmer.

Medical thought, especially, was caught in the crosscurrents of new scientific knowledge rapidly supplanting many older views and a subtle but persistent receptivity to metaphysical ideas.⁷ The emergent professionalization of American medicine augmented doctors’ standing in American society and enhanced their ability to present orthodox medical practices as normative treatments. However, the rise in physicians’ status preceded most progress in the treatment of disease. In many ways, by the 1890s American medicine was starting to resemble the system we have today. Advances across the sciences had helped change medicine, mostly for the better. Structural anatomy had mapped the organs and systems of the human body, and organic chemistry delivered a better understanding of animal nutrition. Perhaps most important, in the last third of the nineteenth century, improvements to microscope lenses gave the instruments the high-definition capacity to identify cell structures and foreign bacteria. As a result, the new field of bacteriology offered better theories of contagion, which helped direct greater public attention to sanitation.

Yet American health and well-being formed a patchwork of experiences that differed according to race, geographic location, culture, and social class. Between domestic migration and immigration, the population of American cities and towns had burgeoned, and these conditions spread diseases like tuberculosis, the leading cause of death.⁸ In the late nineteenth century, American longevity actually declined compared to earlier decades. Furthermore, while medical discoveries offered improved understandings of pathology, they conferred fewer therapeutic benefits. A skilled physician might be able offer an accurate diagnosis of diabetes or cancer, but could do little beyond palliative care for such grave conditions. Not surprisingly, Americans’ embrace of new paradigms, such as the germ theory of disease or the adoption of mass vaccination, was uneven. The discrepancy between the positioning of physicians as new cultural authorities and their real curative capabilities aggravated populist resentments and helped generate the backlash of movements which competed for the allegiance of American health consumers. This turned health culture into a form of social protest, and thereby a site for interesting ideological battles in which both sides mixed real and imagined concerns.

A person falling ill had many therapeutic options. “Regular” or “orthodox” medicine was the system most patronized throughout the nineteenth century, but it was challenged by a host of “irregular” practices, including botanicism, “eclectic medicine,” homeopathy, hygienic principles, and “hydrotherapy.” Health reformers offered their new systems to American consumers as safer, more pleasant options, and sometimes this was true. Even in the late nineteenth century, some “orthodox” physicians continued to practice “heroic” medicine, which relied heavily on bleeding the patient and purging them with emetics.⁹ Moreover, the uneven quality of medical training meant there was often little difference between the abilities of orthodox physicians and irregulars.

D. D. Palmer made appeals to patients’ dissatisfaction with regular medicine, representing his own treatments as a safer, more humane alternative to brutal surgeries. Through the 1890s, almost every edition of his self-published newspapers carried an illustrative article, entitled “Cancers—Their Cause and Cure.” “The generally accepted and college-taught theory is that lupus and cancer are local diseases, hence cutting, eating, or burning them out is the treatment to be used, and this is suggested to you as the only means by which your life can be saved. . . . Anyone who has ever had a lupus or cancer burned out will admit that the pain produced is beyond the power of language to describe. You have been butchered, tortured, deformed, and disfigured. And the saddest and most serious of all is the fact that even after submitting to all the butchery, deformity, etc., you will find the lupus or cancer growing again—there or somewhere else.”¹⁰

Against such injustices D. D. encouraged a popular revolt, so that in 1900 he proclaimed, “There is an unrest among the intelligent liberty-loving people of America. A longing for something that will cure. They have become tired of drug monopoly and M. D.’s—medical dictators.”¹¹ Like other health reformers, he capitalized on antiauthoritarian sentiments by presenting his treatment as an alternative to those of a dangerous, elite medical establishment. The social historian Logie Barrow has argued that in Britain, much “unorthodox” medicine was the product of a “democratic epistemology”—the assumption that laypeople could understand health issues and treat medical conditions.¹² In America, too, alternative medicine has been linked to revolts against deferential order.¹³ Starting in the 1820s, health reformers’ calls for independence from a repressive medical establishment strongly echoed the Jacksonian values of democracy and individualism.¹⁴ They held up the capabilities of common people against the brutal medical profession, thereby invoking populist preferences for self-reliance and disdain for formal education and the posturing of professionals. Thus, the entrepreneurial spirit of alternative medicine was often coupled with—and even cloaked by—a rhetoric that made strong appeals to the rugged individualism of the “common man.”

Nineteenth-century thinkers of many orientations shared a “style of thought” which was both...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• Figures
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• Chapter One: The First Adjustment
• Chapter Two: A Magnetic Healer in Iowa
• Chapter Three: From Vital Magnetism to Vertebral Vitalism
• Chapter Four: On the Frontier of the New Profession
• Chapter Five: Chiropractors on Parade
• Chapter Six: History Repeats
• Chapter Seven: The World of Chiropractic
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index