Summary
Chiropractic is a system of manual healing, founded in Davenport, Iowa in 1895 by Daniel David Palmer, premised on the idea that misaligned vertebrae compress nerves and disrupt the body’s innate healing intelligence, causing disease. From its first recorded adjustment — Palmer’s manipulation of a deaf janitor’s spine — the profession grew into the largest alternative health system in the United States, despite nearly a century of criminal prosecution, internal doctrinal schism, and organized medical opposition. Unlike homeopathy, which faded, or osteopathy, which merged into conventional medicine, chiropractic maintained its distinctive identity and theoretical commitments while achieving full legal recognition in all fifty states by 1974.
Origins: The First Adjustment
Daniel David Palmer (1845–1913) was a Canadian-born former schoolmaster, entrepreneur apiarist, and grocery store owner who had been practicing magnetic healing for a decade (Gevitz (ed.), 1990)(Gevitz, Norman, 2004). He administered the first chiropractic adjustment in September 1895 in Davenport, Iowa, after treating a janitor for deafness by manipulating a displaced vertebra (Gevitz (ed.), 1990). He theorized that all diseases could result from spinal impingement on nerves, creating excess or deficiency of function (Gevitz (ed.), 1990).
In September 1895, in Davenport, Iowa, D. D. Palmer treated Harvey Lillard, a nearly deaf janitor (Whorton, 2002)(Gevitz (ed.), 1990). Lillard told Palmer that his hearing had failed after he felt something “give way” in his back while stooping (Whorton, 2002). Palmer examined the man’s back, found a displaced vertebra, and “racked it into position by using the spinous process as a lever” (Whorton, 2002). Lillard’s hearing was reportedly restored (Whorton, 2002)(Gevitz (ed.), 1990)(Gevitz, Norman, 2004). Palmer theorized that all diseases could result from spinal impingement, a pressure on nerves (Gevitz (ed.), 1990). The word “chiropractic” (done by hand) was proposed by Reverend Samuel Weed (Whorton, 2002).
The name came from a local minister, Reverend Samuel H. Weed, who in 1896 combined the Greek cheir (“hand”) and praktikos (“done by”) to produce “chiropractic” at Palmer’s request (Whorton, 2002)(Gevitz (ed.), 1990). Palmer then did what few healers of his era thought to do systematically: he opened a school and began training students to replicate the technique.
Foundational Theory: Innate Intelligence
Palmer’s theoretical framework rested on a concept he called Innate Intelligence — a universal, organizing intelligence expressing itself through the nervous system to maintain the health of the body (Whorton, 2002). Disease, on this account, results when vertebral subluxations impinge upon nerves and interrupt the transmission of Innate Intelligence to organs and tissues. Restore the proper nerve channel by correcting the subluxation, and the body’s own healing force does the rest.
The framework was explicitly vitalistic and explicitly theological. Palmer drew on Theosophy and his own idiosyncratic spiritual philosophy, and he eventually claimed — with consequences for licensing battles that would last decades — that Innate Intelligence was a fragment of Universal Intelligence, that is, a shard of God flowing through the nervous system (Whorton, 2002)(Whorton, 2002). Health was not a matter of chemistry or bacteriology. It was a matter of unobstructed transmission.
This gave chiropractic a conceptual distinction from osteopathy, which also employed spinal manipulation and also drew on vitalist premises, but whose founder Andrew Taylor Still located the body’s healing power in the free circulation of arterial blood. The distinction between the two professions was not only theoretical but technical. Chiropractors used a single-vertebra, downward-thrust technique — direct contact on the targeted vertebra — while DOs used leverage-based methods applied across longer lever arms and multiple joints; chiropractors also confined their practice to the spine, whereas osteopaths addressed the full musculoskeletal system. (Gevitz, Norman, 2004)(Gevitz, Norman, 2004) The broader theoretical distinction was crystallized by Solon Langworthy, one of the early chiropractors whose theoretical contributions have often been underacknowledged. Langworthy was the first to apply the term “subluxation” to vertebral displacement, the first to identify the brain as the source of all life force, and the first to formulate the chiropractic position explicitly as “supremacy of the nerves” — a direct counter to osteopathy’s “supremacy of the blood” (Gevitz (ed.), 1990). This was not merely professional rivalry. The two professions held genuinely different theories of how the body maintained itself and how it broke down.
Chiropractic’s concept of Innate Intelligence belongs to a broader family of ideas, shared at various points with naturopathy and early osteopathy, that can be traced to the ancient doctrine of vis medicatrix naturae — the healing power of nature. The Palmers’ innovation was to give that force a specific anatomical channel: the nervous system, cleared by the skilled hands of the chiropractor (Gevitz (ed.), 1990).
Institutional Development: The Palmer School
In 1907, B.J. Palmer purchased his father’s struggling school in Davenport for $2,196.79 (Gevitz (ed.), 1990). He then built it into what was probably the largest health practitioner training institution in the United States (Gevitz (ed.), 1990).
B.J. Palmer was a promoter of the first order. He used radio broadcasting, theatrical demonstration, and relentless advertising to build a popular following for chiropractic, and he transformed the Palmer School into what was probably the largest training institution for health practitioners in the United States (Whorton, 2002)(Gevitz (ed.), 1990). He called it the “fountain head” of the profession, and for a generation he was right.
His preeminence did not last. In 1924 B.J. overreached. At the annual homecoming of his followers, he decreed that every chiropractor must henceforth use a “neurocalometer” — a heat-sensing device designed to locate vertebral subluxations by measuring thermal differentials between the two sides of a vertebra — and that the device could only be obtained on a rental basis from the Palmer School, at an initial cost that soon reached $2,500 (Gevitz (ed.), 1990). The decree triggered a mass defection. Four of the school’s most distinguished faculty members left; thousands of practitioners refused. The neurocalometer crisis did not end the Palmer School’s influence, but it permanently broke B.J.’s hold on the profession as a whole (Gevitz (ed.), 1990).
The Straights vs. Mixers Divide
The deepest internal conflict in chiropractic’s history ran not through personalities but through a question of scope: what, exactly, was a chiropractor licensed to do?
B.J. Palmer insisted that ‘straight’ chiropractic was categorically not the practice of medicine; the two were polar opposites (Gevitz (ed.), 1990). He may have adopted this position strategically to establish chiropractic’s legal claim to be a separate profession, thereby creating the ‘straight’ versus ‘mixer’ division that shaped all subsequent chiropractic development (Gevitz (ed.), 1990).
The “mixers” disagreed in practice, if not always in theory. They combined spinal adjustment with naturopathic modalities — hydrotherapy, massage, dietary advice, physiotherapy — and some mixer schools taught obstetrics and minor surgery alongside spinal manipulation (Gevitz (ed.), 1990). The straight-versus-mixer split shaped all later chiropractic development, because it forced the profession to decide whether adjustment alone defined chiropractic or whether a broader drugless practice could still count as chiropractic (Gevitz (ed.), 1990).
The mixer archetype that drew the most attention was Leo Spears (1894–1956), a Denver chiropractor who opened the Spears Free Clinic and Hospital in 1933. By 1943 he had opened the first 200-bed unit of the Spears Chiropractic Hospital, and by 1949 a second unit had been added, creating a facility with 600 beds. Through 1975, Spears Hospital trained approximately 250 chiropractic interns (Gevitz (ed.), 1990). Its existence demonstrated something important: mixer chiropractic could build institutions capable of delivering complex care, on a scale no straight chiropractor had attempted.
Regulatory Battles: Go to Jail for Chiropractic
The licensing history of chiropractic is, in significant part, a history of deliberate lawbreaking.
D.D. Palmer was the first chiropractor arrested and sentenced to jail for practicing medicine without a license (Gevitz (ed.), 1990). By 1927, the UCA had handled 3,300 similar court cases (Gevitz (ed.), 1990). In 1917, the Alameda County, California Chiropractors Association adopted the slogan “Go to jail for chiropractic,” which led to 450 chiropractors going to prison in one year (Gevitz (ed.), 1990).
In California in 1917, 450 chiropractors went to prison in a single year, reportedly singing “Onward Christian Soldiers” on the way in (Gevitz (ed.), 1990). By 1927, the Universal Chiropractors’ Association had handled 3,300 court cases in which practitioners were charged with practicing medicine without a license (Gevitz (ed.), 1990).
The martyrdom logic worked, not as a legal argument — courts were generally unpersuaded — but as a political one. State legislatures, watching practitioners fill jails for touching people’s spines, began to ask whether the medical practice acts had been drawn too broadly. The first chiropractic licensing laws were enacted in Kansas and Arkansas in 1913, each requiring an eighteen-month course of personal instruction at a chartered college (Gevitz (ed.), 1990)(Gevitz, Norman, 2004). By 1922, twenty-two states had passed chiropractic licensing laws, and the number of chiropractors in practice probably exceeded the number of DOs, despite the far shorter training requirements chiropractic programs demanded. (Gevitz, Norman, 2004) By 1931, thirty-nine states had given the profession some form of legal recognition (Gevitz (ed.), 1990). The holdouts — states with powerful medical lobbies and no organized chiropractic constituencies — fell one by one over the following decades: New York in 1963, Massachusetts in 1966, Mississippi in 1973, and Louisiana in 1974, completing the campaign (Gevitz (ed.), 1990).
Religious Dimensions
Palmer identified chiropractic as “The New Theology” of healing, integrating physical health with the Intelligent Life-Force of Creation (God), and explained that Innate Intelligence was “a segment of that Intelligence that fills the universe” (Whorton, 2002)(Whorton, 2002).
Most chiropractors seeking state licensure wanted to be recognized as a secular health profession with scientific credentials, not as practitioners of a revealed metaphysic. The tension between Palmer’s original theological vision and the profession’s desire for conventional professional status helped drive the straight-versus-mixer divide and the broader struggle over what counted as authentic chiropractic (Gevitz (ed.), 1990).
Palmer’s religious claims were never incorporated cleanly into chiropractic’s professional institutions. They survived as part of the profession’s founding ambiguity, and they explain why chiropractic’s theoretical language — “Innate Intelligence,” “Universal Intelligence” — has always sat uneasily alongside the X-ray images and anatomical atlases of a health profession seeking scientific respectability.
Chiropractic’s Survival and Distinctiveness
The sociologist Walter I. Wardwell, writing in Norman Gevitz’s Other Healers, advances an interpretive argument that distinguishes chiropractic from every other medical sect that emerged from nineteenth-century America. Homeopathy and osteopathy, the two most significant alternative healing systems of the era, followed divergent paths toward the same endpoint: homeopathy was reduced nearly to extinction through a combination of scientific embarrassment and professional attrition; osteopathy was absorbed into the medical mainstream through progressive medicalization, eventually winning the right to full prescribing privileges and unlimited hospital admission. By either route, the distinctiveness was erased (Gevitz (ed.), 1990).
Chiropractic took neither path. Faced with continuous organized opposition from the American Medical Association and most state medical societies, attacked in the press, prosecuted in the courts, denied hospital privileges, and excluded from health insurance reimbursement, chiropractic not only survived but grew — and did so without abandoning its philosophical core or adopting orthodox therapies (Gevitz (ed.), 1990). The subluxation doctrine, Innate Intelligence, the commitment to drugless manipulation: these persisted as active theoretical commitments, not vestigial rhetoric, even as the profession pursued and achieved licensure and insurance recognition.
Why? Part of the answer lies in the straight-mixer split itself. By maintaining a “pure” faction that guarded the doctrinal boundaries, chiropractic preserved an identity that osteopathy, which produced no equivalent of the straights, was unable to protect. Part of the answer lies in the prosecution campaigns: the “go to jail” strategy built a professional solidarity and a mythology of resistance that made surrender or assimilation feel like betrayal. And part of the answer lies in the consistent demand for what chiropractors offered — particularly for musculoskeletal pain conditions where orthodox medicine had less to offer than it sometimes claimed.
Whorton’s account in Nature Cures reinforces and extends this picture from an outside observer’s perspective. He notes that by 1925 roughly forty chiropractic schools were operating in the United States, a proliferation that the straight-mixer divide had done nothing to halt — if anything, the availability of mixer schools that combined spinal adjustment with electrotherapy, dietary advice, and other modalities broadened chiropractic’s appeal without eliminating its straight core.(Whorton, 2002) The profusion of schools also made it harder for the AMA to strangle the profession through education reform the way it had homeopathy: there were simply too many programs, in too many states, with too many graduates already in practice. Susan Smith-Cunnien’s sociological study, cited by Whorton, argues that orthodox medicine’s campaign against chiropractic was primarily a professional and political act aimed at consolidating the AMA’s social authority rather than a disinterested defense of public health — a reading that helps explain why even unambiguous evidence of therapeutic implausibility did not end the profession’s growth.(Whorton, 2002)
The distinctiveness was also maintained through an institutional logic that the profession’s critics recognized but could not easily disrupt. Chiropractic’s 1924 neurocalometer crisis — B.J. Palmer’s overreaching attempt to force all practitioners to rent his diagnostic device — paradoxically demonstrated the profession’s resilience: mass defection from Palmer’s school did not kill chiropractic but redistributed it across dozens of independent colleges, none powerful enough to dominate the others but collectively capable of sustaining the profession.(Whorton, 2002) Orthodox medical institutions could negotiate with or absorb a single dominant institution; they had no comparable strategy for a decentralized network.(Whorton, 2002)
Since the 1990s, the broader category of “complementary medicine” has provided a new institutional frame for heterodox systems seeking accommodation with the mainstream. Chiropractic has been among the leading contenders for such mainstream status, alongside acupuncture, homoeopathy, osteopathy, and sometimes naturopathy and therapeutic touch — a grouping that reflects the shared trajectory of once-prosecuted systems now seeking partial institutional recognition rather than outright medical legitimacy.(Jackson (ed.), 2011)
The Nature Cure Assessment
Henry Lindlahr’s Philosophy of Natural Therapeutics (1918) provides one of the most revealing external assessments of chiropractic from a fellow alternative practitioner. Writing from within the Nature Cure tradition, Lindlahr catalogued five distinct American systems of spinal manipulation — A.T. Still’s osteopathy, D.D. Palmer’s chiropractic, Oakley Smith’s naprapathy, Albert Abrams’s spondylotherapy, and his own neurotherapy — and credited all five with genuine therapeutic value while positioning his own as the integrative synthesis (Lindlahr, Henry, 1918). For Lindlahr, Palmer’s chiropractic was a legitimate branch of natural healing; he used chiropractic adjustment alongside fasting and hydrotherapy in his own clinic, reporting its use even in severe cases such as perforating appendicitis (Lindlahr, Henry, 1918).
At the same time, Lindlahr argued that manipulation alone was not sufficient for lasting cure in chronic disease. Correcting the vertebral subluxation and restoring nerve supply produced relief, sometimes substantial, but left intact the morbid accumulations in the tissues that constituted the chronic patient’s underlying constitutional pathology; symptoms would return until those accumulations were eliminated through diet, hydrotherapy, and healing crises (Lindlahr, Henry, 1918). This critique, coming from an ally rather than an opponent, anticipated debates that would run through chiropractic’s own straight-versus-mixer division: whether spinal adjustment alone could address the full range of chronic illness, or whether it required integration with broader constitutional treatment.
See Also
- Daniel David Palmer
- B.J. Palmer
- Osteopathy
- Innate Intelligence
- Vis Medicatrix Naturae
- Vitalism
- Solon Langworthy
- Medical Licensing
- Medical Pluralism
- Naturopathy
- Wilk v. AMA
Sources
Evidence cards: gev90-ch07-001, whor02-ch08-001, gev90-ch07-002, whor02-ch08-002, whor02-ch08-003, gev90-ch07-004, gev90-ch07-009, gev90-ch07-010, gev90-ch07-003, gev90-ch07-007, gev90-ch07-005, gev90-ch07-006, gev90-ch07-008, gev04-ch04-008, gev04-ch04-009, gev04-ch04-010, gev04-ch04-016, gev04-ch04-017, gev04-ch04-018