Daniel David Palmer
Daniel David Palmer (1845—1913) was the Canadian-born founder of chiropractic, a system of manual therapy based on the theory that displaced vertebrae press on nerves and produce disease. Before his 1895 discovery he had worked as a schoolmaster, grocer, beekeeper, and magnetic healer. His first recorded spinal adjustment, performed on a deaf janitor in Davenport, Iowa, launched a profession that would eventually license practitioners in every American state — but at considerable cost to Palmer himself, who was the first chiropractor jailed for practicing medicine without a license. His theological framing of the work, centered on a concept he called “Innate Intelligence,” complicated his relationship with later chiropractors who preferred secular professional claims. His son B.J. purchased the school in 1907 and transformed it into the largest health practitioner training institution in the United States.
Before Chiropractic
Palmer was a former schoolmaster, entrepreneur apiarist, and grocery store owner who had been practicing magnetic healing for a decade before 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). Palmer’s theory of Innate Intelligence held that the vital force was “a segment of that Intelligence that fills the universe” and circulated through the nerves; a subluxation causing nerve impingement could disrupt Innate’s governance and cause illness (Whorton, 2002).
Palmer was born in Port Perry, Ontario, Canada, in 1845. Whorton (2002) confirms Palmer’s Canadian origins as background context but does not narrate his early Canadian years or his migration to the United States; that story must be drawn from dedicated biographical sources. What Whorton does document is that Palmer was well aware of Andrew Taylor Still’s osteopathic work before 1895: in his own Chiropractor’s Adjuster (1910), Palmer quoted Elbert Hubbard’s description of Still as “tall, lanky, homely, angular and chews infinite tobacco” — evidence that the founder of chiropractic had studied his chief competitor carefully (Whorton, 2002).
The First Adjustment and Its Theory
Palmer performed the first recorded chiropractic adjustment in September 1895 in Davenport, Iowa (Gevitz (ed.), 1990). The patient was Harvey Lillard, a janitor who had been deaf for nearly twenty years (Whorton, 2002). Palmer examined him, found a displaced vertebra, “racked it into position by using the spinous process as a lever,” and claimed Lillard’s hearing returned (Whorton, 2002). This led Palmer to theorize that spinal impingement on nerves could produce excess or deficiency of function throughout the body, and that all diseases might originate this way (Gevitz (ed.), 1990).
The word “chiropractic” was coined not by Palmer but by a local minister, the Reverend Samuel H. Weed (Gevitz (ed.), 1990) (Whorton, 2002), who combined the Greek words cheir (hand) and praxis (Gevitz (ed.), 1990). Wardwell gives this as 1896 (Gevitz (ed.), 1990); Whorton notes the proposal without specifying a year (Whorton, 2002). The term was unwieldy (Gevitz (ed.), 1990).
Chiropractic’s “supremacy of the nerves” contrasted with osteopathy’s “supremacy of the blood,” a conceptual distinction drawn most precisely by Solon Langworthy (Gevitz (ed.), 1990). Langworthy was also the first to use the term “subluxation” and the first to argue that the brain was the source of all life force (Gevitz (ed.), 1990).
Innate Intelligence
Palmer’s theoretical framework rested on a concept he called “Innate Intelligence” — an inborn wisdom expressing itself through the nervous system to maintain health (Whorton, 2002). In his own formulation, the vital force of the human body was “a segment of that Intelligence that fills the universe,” a power that “is eternal, always was and always will be” (Whorton, 2002). Innate was that which “never sleeps nor tires, recognizes neither darkness nor distance, and is not subject to material laws or conditions” (Whorton, 2002). Disease resulted when vertebral subluxations impinged on nerves and blocked the transmission of this intelligence to organs and tissues.
The framework was explicitly theological as well as vitalistic. Palmer called his system “The New Theology” of healing, an integration of physical health with “the Intelligent Life-Force of Creation… God” (Whorton, 2002). This framing drew on Theosophy and Palmer’s own quasi-religious philosophy, analyzed by Catherine Albanese in Nature Religion in America (1990) (Whorton, 2002). The Innate Intelligence concept was shared across several drugless healing traditions: naturopathy and early osteopathy used similar language, and Wardwell identifies it as a chiropractic expression of the broader vis medicatrix naturae tradition (Gevitz (ed.), 1990).
Palmer identified chiropractic as “The New Theology” of healing, integrating physical health with the Intelligent Life-Force of Creation (God), connecting it to Theosophy and his own quasi-religious philosophy (Whorton, 2002). This framework was analysed by Catherine Albanese in Nature Religion in America (1990) (Whorton, 2002).
Chiropractic and the Drugless Healing Movement
[GAP: Missing support for claim about Palmer founding chiropractic within a broader cultural milieu of drugless and natural healing and the common focus of chiropractic and naturopathy] By 1922 the number of chiropractors legally and illegally in practice probably exceeded the number of legitimate osteopaths in the country (Gevitz (ed.), 1990). Chiropractic literature in the 1920s routinely claimed extraordinary cure rates for the full range of diseases, including cancer; orthodox physicians documented these claims as evidence of quackery (Whorton, 2002). The historiography of this period is surveyed in Walter Wardwell’s Chiropractic: History and Evolution of a New Profession (1992) and J. Stuart Moore’s Chiropractic in America (1993), which Whorton identifies as the standard scholarly secondary accounts (Whorton, 2002).
Confrontation with the Law
D. D. Palmer was the first chiropractor arrested and sentenced to jail for practicing medicine without a license (Gevitz (ed.), 1990). By 1927 the Universal Chiropractors’ Association had handled 3,300 similar court cases (Gevitz (ed.), 1990). In Massachusetts alone, 450 chiropractors were prosecuted between 1921 and 1928 (Whorton, 2002). In California in 1917, the Alameda County Chiropractors Association adopted the slogan “Go to jail for chiropractic,” and 450 chiropractors went to prison in a single year (Gevitz (ed.), 1990).
Whorton specifies that Palmer’s own conviction was for practicing osteopathy without a license rather than medicine in the generic sense: chiropractic had no separate legal status in 1906, and chiropractors elsewhere were also arrested on charges of practicing osteopathy (Whorton, 2002).
The first chiropractic licensing law was enacted in Kansas in 1913, the year of Palmer’s death (Gevitz (ed.), 1990). Licensing proceeded unevenly: by 1931 thirty-nine states had given the profession some form of legal recognition, but the last holdouts — New York (1963), Massachusetts (1966), Mississippi (1973), and Louisiana (1974) — did not act until more than half a century after Palmer’s first adjustment (Gevitz (ed.), 1990).
Aftermath: B.J. Palmer and the School
D. D. Palmer founded the Palmer School of Chiropractic in Davenport, Iowa, in 1897 (Whorton, 2002). B. J. Palmer purchased the school from his father in 1907 for $2,196.79 (Gevitz (ed.), 1990). Under B.J.’s management it grew into what was probably the largest health practitioner training institution in the United States (Gevitz (ed.), 1990). B.J. built it into the dominant institution of the profession through aggressive marketing (Whorton, 2002).
The father-son relationship was not uncomplicated. D.D. Palmer had framed the work in religious and philosophical terms that B.J. found strategically awkward; B.J. instead insisted that “straight” (pure) chiropractic was categorically not the practice of medicine — a position Wardwell reads as strategically adopted to establish chiropractic’s legal claim to be a separate profession independent of medicine (Gevitz (ed.), 1990). This produced the central internal division of the profession: “straights,” who followed B.J. and limited themselves to spinal adjustment for subluxation, against “mixers,” who combined chiropractic with dietary advice, hydrotherapy, massage, and other therapies borrowed from naturopathy and regular medicine (Whorton, 2002) (Gevitz (ed.), 1990). By 1925 there were roughly forty chiropractic schools in the United States, and mixer schools typically taught naturopathy and physiotherapeutic modalities alongside spinal manipulation (Whorton, 2002). The mixer faction gradually predominated in clinical practice, though the theoretical argument over scope continued through the late twentieth century (Whorton, 2002). Mixer schools taught naturopathy, physiotherapy, obstetrics, and minor surgery alongside spinal manipulation, and the Spears Chiropractic Hospital in Denver operated from 1943 with a 600-bed capacity, training approximately 250 chiropractic interns through 1975 (Gevitz (ed.), 1990).
B.J.’s own overreach came in 1924 when he decreed that all chiropractors should use a heat-sensing device called a “neurocalometer,” obtainable only from his school on a rental basis that rapidly rose to $2,500 (Gevitz (ed.), 1990). Whorton records the initial rental fee as $2,200 (Whorton, 2002). The decree cost B.J. the loyalty of much of his following, including four of the Palmer School’s most distinguished faculty members, and permanently ended his preeminence in the profession (Gevitz (ed.), 1990).
Chiropractic ultimately achieved licensing in all American states by 1974, a process spanning nearly eight decades from D.D. Palmer’s first adjustment (Whorton, 2002). Its survival as a distinct profession — without abandoning its core principles or assimilating into orthodox medicine — Wardwell considers unusual among the major alternative healing traditions, contrasting it explicitly with homeopathy’s near-extinction and osteopathy’s progressive medicalization (Gevitz (ed.), 1990).
Scholarly Assessment
Wardwell and Whorton are the primary secondary authorities on Palmer’s life and on chiropractic’s early history, and their accounts are substantially in agreement on the main facts (Gevitz (ed.), 1990) (Whorton, 2002). Minor discrepancies exist: Wardwell gives 1896 as the year the word “chiropractic” was coined (Gevitz (ed.), 1990), while Whorton does not specify a year, only noting that the word was proposed by Reverend Weed (Whorton, 2002). Whorton provides the most precise account of Innate Intelligence as a theological system (Whorton, 2002) (Whorton, 2002), while Wardwell offers the stronger sociological framework for understanding chiropractic’s survival as a distinct profession (Gevitz (ed.), 1990).
The biographical literature on Palmer’s pre-chiropractic years is thin in the sources indexed here. Whorton confirms the Canadian origins and the decade of magnetic healing, but does not narrate the intervening years (Whorton, 2002). Wardwell identifies the three standard biographical sources: Vern Gielow’s Old Dad Chiro (1981), Joseph Keating’s A History of Chiropractic Education in North America, and A. Augustus Dye’s The Evolution of Chiropractic (1939) (Whorton, 2002). None of these are indexed in the evidence base; a dedicated biographical page on Palmer would need to draw on at least one of them to narrate his early Canadian years and his migration to Iowa.
The religious dimension of Palmer’s thought is evident in his identification of chiropractic as “The New Theology” of healing, integrating physical health with the Intelligent Life-Force of Creation (God) (Whorton, 2002). Catherine Albanese, in Nature Religion in America (1990), analyzed this framework (Whorton, 2002).
Henry Lindlahr, writing in 1918, positioned chiropractic as one of five distinct systems of spinal manipulation that had developed in America, distinguishing Palmer’s focus on vertebral subluxation and nerve impingement from Still’s osteopathy (displaced vertebrae and fascial restrictions), Oakley Smith’s naprapathy (contracted ligaments), Albert Abrams’s spondylotherapy (spinal reflex percussion), and Lindlahr’s own neurotherapy.(Lindlahr, Henry, 1918) Lindlahr credited all five systems with sharing the same foundational premise — that spinal lesions impair nerve supply and that correction restores function — while holding that they differed in anatomical theory and technique, and that his own neurotherapy integrated the valuable elements of each within the Nature Cure constitutional framework.
See Also
Sources
All claims cite evidence cards from:
- Wardwell, W.I. (1994). “Chiropractors: Evolution to Acceptance.” In Gevitz, N. (ed.), Other Healers: Unorthodox Medicine in America. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press. [Source ID: gevitz-otherhealers-1990, ch07]
- Gevitz, N. (1994). “Osteopathic Medicine: From Deviance to Difference.” In Gevitz, N. (ed.), Other Healers. [Source ID: gevitz-otherhealers-1990, ch06]
- Whorton, J.C. (2002). Nature Cures: The History of Alternative Medicine in America. Oxford: Oxford University Press. [Source ID: whorton-nature-cures-2002, ch07–ch08]
Editorial Notes
Gaps the encyclopaedia compiler flagged for future evidence work.
Before Chiropractic