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Ancient Times
The first recorded manipulation was described in an ancient text dating
back to 2650 B.C. by travelers to Asia. Some of these findings show
that Kong Fu writings describe tissue manipulation as part of therapy.
In 1500 B.C., the Greeks were
recording their successes in lower back treatments. Most cultures
practicing medicine have some ancient writings dealing with the spine and
its effect on the body. Many cultures spoke of massaging the back or
even back walking, the practice of laying a patient or family member on
their belly and slowly walking bare foot up and down their back.
American Indians used to have small children walk on the backs of the
sick. There are even records of South American Incas using
manipulation as a form of healing.
In one of Hippocrates many
writings can be found a book called Manipulation and Importance of Good
Health and another work called Setting Joints by Leverage.
These works were written sometime around 500 B.C. He wrote "Get
knowledge of the spine, for this is the requisite for many diseases."
Another famous Greek
Physician, Claudius Galen, wrote early in the second century "Look to
the nervous system as the key to maximum health." Galen was made
famous for treating a scholar named Eudemus. Galen adjusted the neck
of Eudemus which apparently cured a paralysis of the scholar's hand and
arm. Modern Times
The modern history
of chiropractic began on September 18, 1895. It took place in the
small office of Dr. Daniel David Palmer.
 Palmer was born in Port
Perry, Ontario Canada on March 7, 1845. When Palmer was 11 years
old, his father's grocery business failed. Leaving the family with few
options, they returned to the United States to start over. Daniel
and his younger brother stayed behind but in 1865, he and his brother
packed up their meager belongings and left for Iowa to rejoin their
family. Palmer was a
self-educated man (as were many around the turn of the century) with a
thrust for knowledge. This led him to the study of magnetic healing,
a hands on therapy practiced by many medical practitioners of the era.
Palmer opened his
first medical practice in Burlington, Iowa in 1887. He later moved
his office, which included a 14 room infirmary, to Davenport, Iowa.
This is where he would make a discovery that would change the face of
medicine. It
was September 18, 1895 and at the time Dr. Palmer was trying to understand
the cause and effect of disease. Harvey Lillard, an African
American, who was the owner/operator of the janitorial company that
maintained the building where D.D. (Daniel David) Palmer practiced, was
deaf, and had been for 17 years. When asked how he lost his hearing,
Mr. Lillard told D.D. that "while bent over, in a stooped position, I
heard something "pop" in my spine and immediately lost my hearing"
 Harvey
Lillard allowed D.D. Palmer to examine his spine to see if anything could
be done. Dr. Palmer discovered a "lump" on Mr. Lillard's back and
recognized the lump as a badly misaligned vertebra. He reasoned the
the misaligned vertebra might be pinching a nerve that went to Mr.
Lillard's ears, and that restoring the vertebra to it's proper position
might also restore Lillard's hearing. He presented his theory to Mr.
Lillard and requested he be allowed to try and realign the vertebra.
Mr. Lillard agreed and after several treatments much of Harvey Lillard's
hearing was completely restored.
His success
with Lillard led D.D. to start examining the spines of his patients,
basically looking for lumps or areas of soreness.
The second patient to receive D.D.'s new type of
care was a woman who had a heart condition. He used the same method that
he had utilized with Lillard's deafness, and the woman's heart condition
came under control.
The procedure that D.D. performed on Lillard's
spine was not an accident. It resulted from eight years of investigating
why some people were sick and some were not. He had started an intensified
investigation of the nervous system, particularly the nerve pathways going
to different organs and tissue cells. He came to the conclusion that the
brain was the organ that generated life force and energy down the spinal
cord, which acted like a cable, similar to the concept of an electrical
current.
He soon reached the conclusion that if the nerves
were pinched they could create a deficiency of nerve energy being
transmitted and also there could be too much energy, or a hyperaction in
its function. He deduced that the physical body was so constructed that it
was a self-healing organism, providing that there was a balance of the
nerve energy flowing to the organs and tissue cells.
From that
historic day, Sept. 18, 1895, to January 1897, D.D. developed a method
which was the first stage of the philosophy and science of chiropractic,
known as the 'art' of adjusting vertebrae. But he had no name for what he
had discovered.
One day, he asked a patient, Reverend Samuel H.
Weed, a Methodist minister and a Greek scholar, to come up with a name
from the Greek language to describe his practice. Of the several names
submitted to him, D.D. accepted one which combined the words 'chiros' and
'praktikos' (meaning 'done by hand') to describe his adjustment of a
vertebra in the spinal column. They ended up with the name
"Chiropractic".
Although it was D.D. Palmer that discovered
Chiropractic, it was his son B.J. Palmer that is credited with
developing Chiropractic.
B.J. Palmer was the marketeer, educator, and inventor that carried the
chiropractic torch for the next sixty years. B.J. built Palmer School of
Chiropractic in Davenport, Iowa, which was the first chiropractic college
in the world at that time.
Interestingly, B.J. was quite
inventive, too. In fact, he coined the radio business
term--"broadcasting." Previously, broadcasting was an
agricultural term meaning to throw out seeds (ideas). In 1924, B.J. had
the first radio station west of the Mississippi, WOC (or, Wonders Of
Chiropractic). In 1928 he purchased WHO
(With Hands Only) in Des Moines. He wrote and spoke extensively around the
country about radio salesmanship and the effective management of radio
stations. He was a world traveler and writer, who spoke to folks all over
the country, on his 50,000 watt clear channel stations, about his travels
and chiropractic. He was a also a pioneer in television after the war,
building a broadcasting empire to insure the future success of
chiropractic.
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