First chiropractor Daniel David Palmer made a deaf janitor hear by pressing his spine

Daniel David Palmer believed healing was all a matter of manipulating the spine but the medical fraternity was sceptical.

History: Daniel David Palmer the world's first chiropractor, founder of chiropractic therapy

When Daniel David Palmer manipulated the spine of a deaf janitor 120 years ago today, he pioneered a new kind of therapy.

September 18, 1895, is acknowledged as the first instance of chiropractic therapy, according to Palmer who founded a practice and based a system of healing on his success in this particular case. Some of Palmer’s claims for his kind of alternative therapy seemed dubious, as were his medical credentials, which left chiropractors struggling for a degree of acceptance. Although some of Palmer’s more extreme ideas have been debunked by medical science, practising the therapy has grown and spread around the world. While many health professionals and scientists still doubt Palmer’s chiropractic therapy, millions of patients swear by its benefits.

Palmer was born in Canada in 1845 and was initially educated in Ontario, but his formal education was cut short when his father’s business failed and the family moved to Iowa in 1856.

MAGNETIC ATTRACTION

Daniel joined the family in Iowa in 1965, by which time he had educated himself enough to qualify as a teacher. He got a job teaching in Illinois where he taught until 1871. While teaching he met and married Abba Lord and bought a 10 acre property he named Sweet Home. As a sideline, he kept bees and developed his own fruit variety the “Sweet Home raspberry”.

His first marriage failed in about 1873 and in 1874 he married Louvenia Landers. Two years later they had a daughter. In 1881 he sold up his property and moved back to Iowa where he opened a grocery store. His son Bartlett Joshua was born that same year.

At this time Palmer became interested in “magnetic healing”, a form of alternative medicine using massage and Eastern concepts of the body’s energy fields. He set up as a healer in Bulington, Iowa, in 1885.

Daniel David Palmer at work on a patient in about 1900.

He would later say he didn’t “slap or rub” like other magnetics but preferred more subtle methods. He also questioned doctors about diseases and tried to gain an understanding of what made the difference between a sick person and someone who was well. He later moved to Davenport, Iowa, and his practice continued to grow.

SPINAL TAP

In 1895 Harvey Lillard, the janitor in the building where Palmer kept an office, consulted him about his bad back. Lillard was deaf. Palmer asked how he had lost his hearing. Lillard described how he had been working hunched over when something snapped. Palmer manipulated Lillard’s spine, easing his back pain. Several days later Lillard returned to say his hearing had come back. Excited by the possibilities revealed by this case, Palmer began to read everything he could about the spine.

He was intrigued by something in the book On The Articulations by ancient Greek physician Hippocrates the “father of medicine”. It read “In the first place, know the structure of the spine, for this knowledge is requisite in many diseases”. Palmer took this more literally than Hippocrates intended, concluding that all “dis-ease” could be explained by spinal problems.

He speculated that the spine was interfering with nerves which caused the body to malfunction, creating a range of different conditions and diseases. He developed his system which he named chiropractic, from the Greek word chiro, meaning hand, and praktikos, meaning action, and in 1897 opened his own healing school, admitting his first student in 1898.

DD Palmer paved the way for the likes of chiropractor Dr John Braund who tuned the nervous system of former world driving champion Nelson Piquet in 1988.

In 1906 he was prosecuted for practising medicine without a licence. The first of many and continuing struggles to be seen as a legitimate “science”. Palmer sold the school to his son Bartlett, but the two argued over the direction of chiropractic therapy and Palmer’s complaints he had not been given enough credit as founder.

Palmer died in 1913, of typhoid fever, shortly after accusing his son of hitting him with an automobile. Some claim Palmer died from injuries sustained after being run over by his son.

MOVING DOWN UNDER

THE first Palmer school trained chiropractor Henry Otterholt arrived in Australia arrived in 1905. Recruited to take over the practice of another untrained therapist who went to the US for tuition.

In turn Otterholt would recruit other therapists to train at the Palmer school. By 1906 there were several practices offering cures for “Sciatica, Insomnia, Nervous Diseases” and chronic pain across the country.

One of the most famous cases of Australians going to study at the Palmer school was Mack and Dorothy Searby who walked across the US in 1928 wheeling a cart.

Originally published as First chiropractor Daniel David Palmer made a deaf janitor hear by pressing his spine