The Religion of Chiropractic: Populist Healing from the American Heartland

By Holly Folk

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.

• Language: English
• Publisher: The University of North Carolina Press
• Release date: Mar 13, 2017
• ISBN: 9781469632803

Holly Folk

Holly Folk is associate professor of liberal studies at Western Washington University.

Book preview

The Religion of Chiropractic

The Religion of Chiropractic

Populist Healing from the American Heartland

Holly Folk

The University of North Carolina Press

Chapel Hill

This book was published with the assistance of the Lilian R. Furst Fund of the University of North Carolina Press.

© 2017 THE UNIVERSITY OF NORTH CAROLINA PRESS

All rights reserved. Designed by Sally Fry Scruggs and set in Utopia and Novecento by codeMantra. Manufactured in the United States of America. The University of North Carolina Press has been a member of the Green Press Initiative since 2003.

Cover illustration: diagram of the Cerebro-Spinal System of Nerves from H. Newell Martin, The Human Body: A Text-book of Anatomy, Physiology and Hygiene (New York: Henry Holt and Company, 1900), 233. This image was reprinted in many nineteenth-century popular health books; D. D. Palmer included it in The Chiropractor’s Adjuster (1910).

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: Folk, Holly, author.

Title: The religion of chiropractic : populist healing from the American heartland / Holly Folk.

Description: Chapel Hill : The University of North Carolina Press, [2017] |Includes bibliographical references and index.

Identifiers: LCCN 2016033872 | ISBN 9781469632780 (cloth: alk. paper) | ISBN 9781469632797 (pbk : alk. paper) | ISBN 9781469632803 (ebook)

Subjects: LCSH: Chiropractic—United States—History. | Medicine—United States—Religious aspects. | Palmer, D. D. (Daniel David), 1845–1913. | Palmer, B. J. (Bartlett Joshua), 1881– | Chiropractic—Study and teaching—United States—History. | Palmer College of Chiropractic.

Classification: LCC RZ225.U6 F65 2017 | DDC 615.5/340973—dc23

LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2016033872

FOR BEN AND HELEN FOLK,

AND ANDREW AND EMMA TYUKODY

Contents

Acknowledgments

Introduction

ONE The First Adjustment

TWO A Magnetic Healer in Iowa

THREE From Vital Magnetism to Vertebral Vitalism

FOUR On the Frontier of the New Profession

FIVE Chiropractors on Parade

SIX History Repeats

SEVEN The World of Chiropractic

Notes

Bibliography

Index

Figures

Daniel David (D. D.) Palmer, ca. 1905, 55

Harvey Lillard, the first Chiropractic patient, 77

Henry Hall Sherwood’s 1841 spinal chart, 88

B. J. Palmer, 110

Mabel Heath Palmer, 112

D. D. Palmer—the Chiropractic Fountain-Head, 128

Palmer School of Chiropractic, Davenport, Iowa, ca. 1912, 149

1918 Meric spinal chart, 177

The Palmer Mansion, 182

The Palmer Printery, ca. 1930s, 185

Progress/Power over Death, ca. 1912, 195

Lyceum parade, ca. 1921, 198

Little Bit O’Heaven garden, 204

The Neurocalometer, 207

David Daniel Palmer, 227

Builders of America testimonial, 236

Acknowledgments

If you ever see a turtle on top of a fence post, you know it didn’t get there by itself.

—Kentucky Adage

This work owes a great deal to the chiropractic historians who blazed a trail: Vern Gielow, Mervyn Zarbuck, Joseph Donahue, and Russell Gibbons. I owe a special debt to Joseph C. Keating Jr., who was an exceptional mentor for me and many other researchers in chiropractic history.

Songs of praise are due to my reviewers, Timothy Miller and Pamela Klassen, whose rigorous engagement with my work expanded the dimensions in which I thought about the project. They made many helpful suggestions, yet also offered the needed encouragement for me to take the inquiry in the directions I felt it needed to go. I am a much better scholar thanks to them.

I want to thank my editor at UNC Press, Elaine Maisner, for seeing potential in this project and nurturing its development. She tempered my argument in places warranted, but tolerated its irreverent, vernacular style. Elaine was a guiding presence over a long writing process. The book was brought to what felt like a swift completion with the assistance of a large production team. I appreciate all the steps, large and small, taken by members of UNC Press who helped with this project, especially Becki Reibman, Jay Mazzocchi, and Dino Battista.

I did much of the research for this book at the Davenport, Iowa, campus of Palmer Chiropractic University. I appreciate the hospitality of everyone at the school, especially Victor Strang, Fred Barge, and Alana Calendar. A heartfelt note of thanks to Glenda Wiese, Dennis Peterson, and Rosemary Riess—all in Special Collections at the David D. Palmer Health Sciences Library. At Western Washington University, thanks are owed to the Liberal Studies Department, the College of Humanities and Social Sciences, and Western Libraries.

The insights and support of many colleagues have been vital forces for this book. My thinking about new religious movements has been greatly improved by conversations with Susan Palmer, George Chryssides, Eileen Barker, Larry Foster, Ben Zeller, and Catherine Wessinger. Members of the NRM listserv generously shared ideas and pdf files of hard-to-find sources. I owe my understanding of Western Esotericism to the collective wisdom of Brad Whitsel, Jocelyn Godwin, Jean-Francois Meyer, Jeff Kripal, and Joe Nickel, and especially to the tutelage of Gordon Melton and Massimo Introvigne. Let me state my enduring gratitude to the scholars who so strongly influenced my understanding of American cultural history: Randall Balmer, Richard Bushman, Robert Orsi, Mary Jo Weaver, Wendy Gamber, Paul Gutjahr, and the incomparable Steven Stein.

Michael and Deborah Goldberg introduced me to the social-scientific study of American medicine years ago. Much of what I know about both ACAM and modern neuroscience can be traced back to conversations at their dinner table. Through my travails as a road cyclist, I have met healthcare providers from many fields. Special appreciation goes out to Erich Weidenbener, MD; Harvey Schwartz, DC; Joseph Wessels, ND; and Matthew Oswin, DO. I am glad for their honest assessments of the social terrain of their professions and for encouraging me to persevere in understanding them.

Thanks to the friends who have reached out through space and time: Donna Meigs Jaques, Tom Lappas, Maria Manzola, Cuong Mai, Jeanne Smith, Sylvia Van Bruggen, Douglas Padgett, Sonja Spear, Glenn Zuber, Amy Anderson, Amites Sarkar, Kathryn Lofton, Becca Harlin, Branko Curgus, David Hartenstine, Richard Gardiner, Dean Christiansen, George Dyson, Zoe Alderton, Peter Reinke, Guy Darst, Laura Kohl, Jessica Anderson, and Johann Neem.

Peter Scott gets a line of his own, for being Totally Shimano.

I want to acknowledge Steven S. Power for his help with these acknowledgments. And thanks to my colleague Rob Stoops, who read drafts of the manuscript with the forbearance of Jehovah.

This project consumed much of my attention for some time, and I am glad for the love of my family to see me through it: Carolyn and Melvin Schwartz, David Folk, and Emma Tyukody. Gratitude, especially, to my daughters, Canaan and Anikó, for their faith and long-sufferingness, and for endowing my life with purpose.

This book is dedicated to my grandparents, whose commitment to the future helped me reach this season.

The Religion of Chiropractic

Introduction

To force people to choose a doctor they do not want is to interfere with their liberty and individual rights. When human liberty is restricted for any pretext whatever, there is danger and trouble ahead. It brings the majesty of law into disrepute, demoralizes the community in which unjust laws are enforced, and incites a rebellious spirit.

—D. D. Palmer

The intent of this book is to treat chiropractic as a case study to explore a persistent overlap of beliefs and practices found in many American subcultures. It is neither possible or desirable to adjudicate the scientific status of something as heterogeneous as alternative medicine; regular and alternative medicine are not scientific descriptors, but socially defined categories with differing criteria for authoritative knowledge but much other content in common. Regular and alternative capture cultural attitudes toward health beliefs and practices.

I hope to persuade readers of the importance of reconstructing the lineage for ideas often rendered eternal or perennial by participants in the Metaphysical movement—new religions that emerged in nineteenth-century America and Europe and shared a Neoplatonic idealist orientation. (In this text, the Metaphysical traditions are distinguished from the philosophical branch of metaphysics by their different capitalization.) Today, Holism is popular around the world, and wherever literacy, technology, and global culture have spread, Western types of alternative medicine appear to have growing appeal. Alternative medicine and spirituality have rich intellectual histories behind them, though the language applied to these movements has changed over time. Thus my goals are both to relate the chiropractic narrative and put it into historical context. I will document the progression of a set of ideas through many health systems. In this way, I hope to offer an interpretive framework for alternative medicine and spirituality.

Chiropractic is among the best examples of a convergence of two outlooks that give consistency to alternative medicine. I carry the twin themes of vitalism and populism through this book, and I believe a great deal of alternative medicine can be apprehended through them.

That vitalist ideas connect alternative religion and alternative medicine is evidenced in the ubiquitous phrase, Body, Mind and Spirit. Vitalist ideas are protean, adaptive to science, spirituality, and different theoretical nuances. This is one of the reasons they are so enduring. Often vitalist ideas are deliberately not interrogated, but rather reified and presented as the way things are. This is not accidental. Vitalism legitimates heterogeneous beliefs and practices and justifies treatments in the minds of both patrons and practitioners. The persistence of these ideas into the modern age points to an enduring uncertainty about how to demarcate the natural from the supernatural, and the sacred from the profane.

Historians have shown the flow of a charged populist sentiment into many cultural ventures in the decades after the American Revolution.¹ Interpretations of Jacksonian culture are not unified: both scholars and the public disagree about the meaning, significance, and implications of ideologized democracy.² I hope my work opens up alternative medicine to a similarly broad interpretive treatment. I understand populism primarily as a cultural orientation, based on the view that the power of elites must be contained in all realms for egalitarian democracy to work. The chiropractic movement did not seek alignment with political or agrarian populists, but it traded on sentiments that had been nurtured in American health subcultures for a long time. Populists are often portrayed as anti-intellectual, but they are just as often counter-intellectual—pursuing alternatives to mainstream knowledge, which they see as tainted by plutocrats and aristocrats.³

Chiropractic resonated not only with beliefs and practices that were widespread in the culture of its origin, but with the social attitudes that upheld them. It is notable that endeavors like chiropractic emerged at the precise historical moment when the relationship between science and religion was fracturing, at least in the perceptions of many people. The embrace of nature as a healing agent can be seen as a rejection of modernity and industrialization. Even more important was the cultivation of an antiauthoritarianism that I believe is characteristic of alternative medicine then and now. Early irregular medicine invoked the cultural idea of democratic individualism that was constructed in the Early Republic and Jacksonian Era, aligning patriotism with health liberty. Like its predecessors, the chiropractic movement consistently makes appeals to individualism, egalitarianism, and self-determination in health issues.

My work brings me to consider chiropractic theory as a type of radically independent lay scientific discourse. In the nineteenth century, writing and self-publishing became a means of resistance and self-expression. One can find no better exponents of this tendency than Daniel David (D. D.) Palmer and his son, Joshua Bartlett (B. J. Palmer), respectively the discoverer and developer of chiropractic, whose life histories are the backbone of this book. The Palmers’ careers illustrate how writing and publishing offered ways for individuals to assert themselves in a society that was rapidly becoming more industrial, bureaucratic, hierarchical, and anonymous. In the early twentieth century (and into the present), chiropractic offered a way to be existentially, and to be knowledgeable and scientific in a competitive cultural environment, at a time when science was rapidly becoming something nonprofessionals could not understand or engage. It is no accident that so many chiropractors self-published refinements of chiropractic theory, ran experiments, and made discoveries.

In the Progressive Era, supernaturalism was rejected in favor of science, but some people appropriated scientific frameworks to support their understandings of the supernatural. This complicates the perceived divide between science and religion. I hope my work opens discussions about some of the conceptual boundaries used in American religious history, helping fill the call issued by Courtney Bender to collapse the binary distinctions between popular and official, public and private, institutional and individual religion to closer analysis of the interactions between them.⁴

Chiropractic was one of many systems designed to heal by handling the vertebral column and thereby regulating the life force residing in the central nervous system. I use the phrase vertebral vitalism to describe this popular physiology. Vertebral vitalism was a tapestry of ideas, some centuries old, from domains across Western science, religion, and philosophy. It brought together the array of ideas informing medical and Metaphysical vitalism, and incorporated advances in the field of neurology. In Europe it emerged as an articulated theory in the eighteenth century. Prominent figures like Hermann Boerhaave, Albrecht von Haller, and Robert Whytt came to endorse its premises. While vertebral vitalism was first advanced by these medical elites, in America and the British Isles the paradigm trickled down to both medical reformers and lay people. By the late eighteenth century, discussions of the nervous system began to appear in magazines and the compendiums of useful knowledge that were one of the most widely purchased types of books. It was in such popular literature, oriented to a general readership, that the vertebral vitalist paradigm grew to full fruition by the middle of the nineteenth century, and where it came to encompass an admixture of medical theory from several periods, folk healing practices, and both older and recent religious ideas. While its lead practices were therapeutic touch and other treatments directly applied to the back, vertebral vitalism also was invoked to explain and justify a range of healing practices including conventional medicine, diet reform, water cure, and some types of spiritual healing. It was subscribed to by large numbers of lay people, some regular doctors, and most medical sectarians. The sheer pervasiveness of these ideas should have ramifications for one’s understanding of science, religion, medicine, and healing in Progressive Era America.

What most Americans understand about chiropractic is mediated through their experiences with chiropractic care. When they begin visiting a chiropractor, people usually do not think of chiropractic as a treatment offering potential benefits for general health beyond back pain. They might be surprised to know chiropractors see it as useful this way and to learn how this perspective is supported through prevalent chiropractic theory, which is only partially revealed in initial office visits. Today, chiropractic is widely understood to be a theory of therapeutic spinal manipulation, most often recommended for lower back pain. Yet its creator envisioned chiropractic as more than musculoskeletal physical therapy. D. D. Palmer reinterpreted vitalist and metaphysical principles circulating in popular American health culture. He identified Innate Intelligence as the main determinant of health. Innate was one of three Intelligences or Forces in Palmer’s second chiropractic system; by this he meant the spirit or personal manifestation of the cosmic power of Universal Intelligence. The third force D. D. called Educated Intelligence. This term is best understood as the conscious individual mind, an entity that held great power in many Metaphysical systems, though less in chiropractic. The interplay of these forces was responsible for all the workings of life, in that every living creature was a manifestation of an immanent divine force; human beings and the divine were therefore consubstantial.

More than a theory of pinched nerves, Palmer’s understanding of chiropractic indicated a deep engagement with the religious questions of the day. It posited a divine (though not anthropomorphic) Mind, and established a relationship between Consciousness or Spirit and Matter. Just as he viewed chiropractic as an improvement over magnetic healing, D. D. claimed his practice was superior to other Metaphysical traditions. For example, Christian Science denied Matter and privileged Spirit; Mental Healing proclaimed Mind over Matter; but in chiropractic, Spirit worked through Matter. Only chiropractic, therefore, properly understood the cosmic laws that governed health. In this way, chiropractic was to be a comprehensive theory of health and illness. Palmer proffered his new system as effective for cancer, diphtheria, and childbed fever. He believed it would supersede orthodox medicine’s germ theory of disease.

Many scholars have chronicled the affinities between alternative spirituality and alternative medicine. Sydney E. Ahlstrom posited a set of related movements he called the Harmonial tradition, that have been especially important for scholarship on health and healing.⁵ Ahlstrom described Harmonialism as an impulse that transcended most conventional boundaries of religious affiliation, giving rise to a family of subtraditions unified by a sense of integration between the individual believer and the cosmos. Harmonialists shared an interest in spiritual composure, physical health, and, sometimes, financial well-being. Ahlstrom inspired other scholars to discuss alternative medicine and spirituality as manifestations of a common impulse, alternately referred to as Harmonial or Metaphysical traditions.⁶ Spiritualism, Mind Cure, New Thought, and Christian Science are prominent movements, with substantial followings even today. Yet these well-known traditions represent only a fraction of Americans’ engagement with this distinct religious outlook. Most Metaphysical bodies were ephemeral and small, and only a few built large, lasting institutions. Yet the aggregate number of groups has been almost too high to count, leading religion scholar Catherine L. Albanese to argue persuasively that Metaphysical spirituality is a third stream in American religious life, one that rivals Liturgical Christianity or Evangelical Protestantism.

Chiropractic both reflects and problematizes what is known about the Metaphysical movement. Its theories relate the material world to higher spiritual realities. Historically, the profession has been male in both fact and vision, so that feminized representations of healing have been downplayed. And the organizational models chiropractic has pursued—as a profession and an organized commercial enterprise—set the system at an odd angle to many forms of religion and spirituality, even while Chiropractic Philosophy carries nearly all of J. Stillson Judah’s Metaphysical markers.⁷ Both scientific and spiritual, chiropractic is a pragmatic, applied philosophy that understands the divine as an impersonal force that is indwelling in human beings and connected to their physical and psychic well-being. Chiropractic healing philosophies exist along a spectrum of spiritual emphasis, but the more intense manifestations are not averse to coopting doctrines from established religions, such as Buddhism and Christianity.

Some key historians have influenced my understanding of the interweaving of healing, business success, and spiritual happiness in the American Metaphysical movement. Kathryn Lofton has described the New Thought Movement as a combinatory trope whose philosophical idealism first justifies spiritual healing, and then prosperity. Lofton distills these observations into an aphorism worthy of the best New Thought thinker: Coming into consciousness with God produces health; likewise, coming into consciousness with God produces abundance.⁸ Nonetheless, the promise of business success is usually treated humorously in popular culture—one can think of motivational speaker Tony Robbins, who even parodied himself in the comedy film Shallow Hal. The elective affinity provokes anxieties about religion and profit that scholars of religion also can have difficulty bracketing. A prominent exception, though, is Donald Meyer, who put the emergence of the Metaphysical movement into historical context in The Positive Thinkers. Meyer argues that the individualism and self-confidence stressed in Metaphysical philosophies were strategies to maintain a sense of human meaning in a depersonalizing, bureaucratic, post-industrial society. I am very influenced by his interpretation of success-oriented business culture.

This book describes the evolution of the chiropractic profession alongside the biographies of three generations of the Palmer family. The Palmers were not the only chiropractic dynasty. Like many new religious movements, kinship maintained the chiropractic movement and supports the subculture today.⁹ Family practices are handed down from father to son, and slightly less frequently to daughters, and the descendants of founders lead or remain closely connected to many chiropractic schools. But the tempestuousness of the Palmer family history set the tone for the chiropractic profession for many decades. And their notorious interpersonal hostilities are useful in understanding how such conflicts affect social movements prone to schism. Two relevant examples are Christian Science and Theosophy, which both weathered bitter fallings-out between founders and key disciples. I believe such fractures are not accidents, but proceed from the personalities of the movements’ founders, whose extreme individualism was, in many cases, the cause of both their success their undoing. Metaphysical ideologies seem to attract people not given to excel at following orders or doing the kind of cooperative work that is necessary to form large and lasting institutions.¹⁰ I believe this bent toward individualism is responsible for the pattern of growth and dissemination we see in alternative spirituality more broadly: instead of being vertical and directed toward Weberian rationalization, the spread is horizontal and toward fragmentation or better yet—fractalization. The Palmers’ biographies and the growth of the chiropractic profession illustrate this tendency magnificently.

Due to its subaltern positioning, chiropractic was until quite recently ignored by historians of medicine. Thus chiropractic history has been told largely by chiropractors. This has at least two implications, both historiographic and interpretive. A good deal of chiropractic history is partisan and even hagiographic, but it is also worth noting that within the chiropractic world, writing history stands as a discursive practice through which chiropractors deepen their connections to their vocation. For Straight chiropractors who have acutely religious understandings of the practice, writing is an act through which the Divine becomes real.¹¹ A number of historians have argued forcefully for the importance of print cultures in the making of American religious life.¹² Books, newspapers, correspondence, and self-published manifestos have been especially important for liberal and alternative spiritualities, whose adherents were dispersed across the land. For groups that did not enjoy the advantages of large numbers of believers in close geographic proximity, print culture created a sense of identity through textual communities.

This book is not meant to be an institutional history, which is much better told by the historian Johnny Stuart Moore and the sociologist Walter Wardwell.¹³ Nor is it meant to be a detailed biography of the Palmers, for I cannot augment the studies by Vern Gielow and Joseph F. Keating, biographers of D. D. and B. J. Palmer, respectively.¹⁴ My work engages most directly with that of Catherine L. Albanese and Candy Gunther Brown, who each have written on chiropractic from the perspectives of religion and cultural history.¹⁵ I build on their studies, but differ in focus and interpretation in my emphasis on the topics of vitalism and popular intellectual culture. I intend to show that it was less the uniqueness of D. D. Palmer’s discovery than the strategic placement of his practice in a remarkable cultural milieu that accounts for much of the early success of the profession. I understand alternative medical theories as a form of cultural resistance to a rapidly centralizing medical establishment.¹⁶ A number of historians of science have explored the use of knowledge alternatives as vehicles for social engagement, cohesion, and even protest.¹⁷ This inquiry is separate from questions about the effectiveness of alternative and complimentary therapies. While the effectiveness of different treatments has varied widely, their cultural orientation has been remarkably consistent. Dissent has been a dominant feature of alternative medicine for the past 200 years.

I use perspectives from the field of religious studies, which allows me to bracket truth claims about vitalism in favor of cultural interpretation. In explaining my work to people, I have found it necessary, and also very challenging, to communicate my view that many of the ideas carried in alternative medicine are theological in nature. But philosophies that reify the life principle into an intentional, conscious presence in the body de facto shift the terrain of inquiry from science to religion. Ironically, even while I try to show the conceptual alchemy of that shift in my scholarship, I follow many of the lifestyle habits associated with alternative health movements.

This book is greatly informed by two specific theoretical perspectives from religious studies. The chiropractic story shows how religious work is done in practical, mundane experiences as well as formal ritual settings. This is especially important today, in an era of declining church attendance, religious disaffiliation, and an increase in people’s self-identification as unaffiliated or nones. I follow the lead of scholars of lived religion who have rightfully directed us to refocus our attention toward religious life in the everyday. A lived religion approach recognizes both beliefs and practices as important, and sees authorities and lay people as engaged in shared and equally valid projects of creating religious meaning.¹⁸ Robert Orsi and Karen Brown argue persuasively that healing, defined expansively as physical, psychic or social reconciliation, is the central activity of religion. The focus on laity, the spiritual content of daily life, and the importance of healing bring chiropractic into the religious fold. Above all, lived religion understands religious actors making choices and connections among the content they encounter. Wendy Doniger makes this point well in describing religious settings as pointillist, like the separate dots that form the shape of a modernist painting.¹⁹ Lived religion recognizes the intense subjectivity that drives doctrinal differences. This is a helpful insight when thinking about the fissiparousness of the chiropractic movement.

Whereas approaches from religious studies can illuminate the chiropractic movement, chiropractic has the potential to advance scholarly understandings of religion and healing. The social repair of relationships, resolution of spiritual distress, connection with the transcendent, or helping the individual endure suffering—these are foci in the scholarship of religion and healing that track well with the goals of Western holism.²⁰ Healing is certainly the focus of chiropractic, and individual chiropractors deliver balms for the psyche, especially for long-term patients who regard them as confidants. But the treatment often is quite physically forceful; some patients find it painful. As people, chiropractors may not lack empathy, yet the healthy-minded orientation and individualist economic values cultivated by the profession pull it away from the liberal healing ethos. Most important, the chiropractic subculture has cultivated an interpersonal assertiveness that can discomfit those who have experienced it. Despite being a touch-based therapy, there is much in chiropractic that is not touchy-feely.

The second insight from religious studies comes from church historian Ernst Troeltsch, himself an observer of the changes I document here. Troeltsch observed that the nineteenth-century print revolution had so greatly expanded the available options for knowledge that it changed the basis for epistemology, making it normal for individuals to determine truth for themselves. Troeltsch thought the refashioning of truth in radically individualist terms united an array of intellectual and philosophical developments. He saw it specifically behind the Metaphysical spiritualities kindred to chiropractic. Troeltsch viewed spiritual religion negatively, because of its potential to undermine collective religious life. As Courtney Bender points out, this perception lingers in scholars’ criticism of alternative spirituality for failing to build lasting institutions.²¹ Bender recommends looking for religion and spirituality in places that are not usually thought of as religious, which she sees as critical in a secular age.²²

Chiropractic does build institutions, but on a platform distinct from congregational religious ventures. Structured as a profession, chiropractic argues for an expansion of the types of categories through which religion can be mediated, and in which growth or success can be detected. The chiropractic story should alert us to how spirituality penetrates into the everyday. Late in life, D. D. Palmer wrote an essay that was published posthumously, The Moral and Religious Duty of a Chiropractor.²³ D. D. did not want to incorporate chiropractic as a religion; rather, he felt chiropractors should be able to use the religious conscience clauses in the medical laws of many states. I do not propose to change chiropractic, either in its science, art or philosophy, into a religion. . . . There is a vast difference between a theological religion and a religious duty; between the precepts and practices of religion and that of chiropractic. A person may be a conscientious devotee of any theological creed and yet be a strict, upright, exalted principled practitioner of chiropractic. . . . Chiro Religio, Chiropractic Religion, the Religion of Chiropractic and the Religious Duty of a Chiropractor are one and the same.²⁴ Chiropractic Philosophy was intended as a parallel system to the confessional commitments felt by individual chiropractors. At the same time, Chiropractic Religion was something D. D. invested with great meaning. Not only were chiropractors bound by sacred obligations to care for their patients, it is clear from the essay that D. D. saw chiropractic theory conforming to a metaphysical system in which the world operated scientifically but was fueled by divine power. Then and now, chiropractic’s overtly religious dimension was disavowed by much of the profession, but the spiritual impulse behind D. D.’s exhortation has proved quite resilient.

Insofar as it tries to reconstruct the intellectual history of a fractious movement, this book seeks narrative clarity and follows the most important veins, while admitting some issues will receive less attention. Little consideration is paid to the spirituality of chiropractic patients, for though some share chiropractors’ interest in Metaphysics, Chiropractic Philosophy is much more important to practitioners. My treatment of gender focuses on the men who formed the ranks of the chiropractic movement. The creation of the chiropractic system, its establishment as a profession, and internal struggles for authority in the chiropractic movement were negotiated in almost entirely male arenas, with women conspicuously absent from ideological battles. The archetypes championed by the profession include the small businessman, the great man of scientific discovery, and the populist patriot fighting for intellectual and therapeutic equality. One might wonder whether any of these transpose well enough to women to value their equal participation, and speculate about whether this is intentional. In the pages of Chiropractic History and the publications of many chiropractic colleges and professional associations, there is substantial evidence that while gender expectations were those of small-town, white, Protestant America, women were not held in disrespect. But this does not get around the fact that into the 1990s women were a distinct minority among chiropractors.

The realities of chiropractic history also reveal uneasy truths about the profession’s relationship to race and ethnicity. B. J. Palmer held troublesome attitudes toward Jewish people and African-Americans, and Palmer College of Chiropractic had a racial bar in admissions until after Brown v. Board of Education. Furthermore, it is likely that B. J. was not alone among chiropractors on these points. Other schools also discriminated, and even the ones that did not do so officially maintained a passive segregation, with few attempts to integrate the profession. As a result, until recently, few African-Americans became chiropractors. Their under-representation is why this book does not directly engage the experiences of people of color in the profession. Rather, I focus on the racial subtext that has shaped understandings of success and what it means to be mainstream, and on the overlap between chiropractic and some forms of white nationalism.

The chiropractic story cuts sharply against the historiography of alternative medicine. In the United States, much scholarship on alternative medicine has seen it as part of a holistic paradigm associated with the 1960s counterculture, progressive lifestyles, and with the East and West Coasts geographically (i.e., Blue States). I do not contest the relationship between alternative medicine and alternative spirituality, and by extension, of the ties bonding holistic health culture to progressive lifestyles. Still, I feel this representation is too simple and by itself incomplete. Not only does the chiropractic movement resist this characterization, there is ample evidence that alternative health practices are hardy and abundant in Red State America.

While chiropractic has been tremendously important in the proliferation of alternative medicine and religion, its interactions with institutional religions are more difficult to capture. For the record, I know of few studies that address religious affiliation by profession, though the Pew Research Center evaluated the beliefs of scientists by their fields. With some qualifications, the spiritual commitments of chiropractors appear to comport with the general U.S. population. Many chiropractors are Roman Catholics, or denominational or Evangelical Protestants. Mormons are also well-represented in chiropractic; it is worth noting the presence of Latter-day Saints among early chiropractic pioneers, including John Howard, who founded the National College of Chiropractic and Nephi L. Cottam, an early proponent of cranial manipulation. While Jewish Americans have recently joined the profession in greater numbers than in years past, they are not over-represented as in regular medicine. Some of these constituencies are served by faith-specific professional organizations, including the Christian Chiropractors Association, the Catholic Chiropractors Association, and the now-defunct Association of Orthodox Jewish Chiropractors. These para-church institutions provide networking and fellowship, as well as creative adaptations of chiropractic metaphysics to the theology of their respective traditions. On the East and West Coasts, especially, a great many chiropractors engage with New Age spirituality. Others distance themselves from organized expressions and prefer a more vague interpretation of being spiritual but not religious. Across these different faith commitments, however, there is a great variety of personal interpretations of Chiropractic Philosophy. These differences have a stronger impact on the profession than denominational affiliation. Chiropractic Philosophy is so embedded in the history of the profession that even chiropractors who reject it must negotiate its impact on their interpretation of the system.

OVERVIEW OF THE BOOK

The Palmers’ writing is an amalgam of their own work, that of contributors who willingly forewent recognition, and (at least in the case of B. J.), outright plagiarism from other sources. I have come to understand such pilfering as a feature of the entire genre of populist intellectual writing. In choosing sources by which to show the Palmers’ thought, I have chosen to focus on sources that would hold up to authorial scrutiny.

Chapter 1, The First Adjustment: A Chiropractic Story, relates the discovery of chiropractic by D. D. Palmer in the mid-1890s. Here I discuss the meaning of the history of their profession to chiropractors and introduce two main themes, vitalism and populism, as major forces in the emergence of alternative medicine in the nineteenth century. I started out on this project in the hope of developing a unified theory for alternative religion and medicine. Since then, my aspirations about comprehensive theories have grown more modest, but I believe these two themes remain helpful heuristics.

Chapter 2, A Magnetic Healer in Iowa, considers the early life of D. D. Palmer. It explores the roots of chiropractic in magnetic healing, and discusses the changes in that practice from its eighteenth-century form as mesmerism through its nineteenth-century encounter with neurology and other modern medical sciences.

Chapter 3, From Vital Magnetism to Vertebral Vitalism, presents the steps by which early chiropractic became an organized system of health care: the elaboration of chiropractic theories, the establishment of training institutes like the Palmer School of Chiropractic (PSC) in Davenport, Iowa, and the making of a collective consciousness for the profession. D. D. had considerable help from his son, B. J. Palmer, in developing chiropractic theory, though their relationship was fraught with hostility. As the number of practitioners grew, the Palmers benefited from professional collaborations and also faced bitter competition from past colleagues who became rivals.

Chapters 4 and 5 continue tracing the institutional growth of chiropractic, with special attention to the role of ideas and theories in building the profession. On the Frontier of the New Profession considers the years from 1903 to 1910, when D. D. and B. J. Palmer tried unsuccessfully to share power at the Palmer School of Chiropractic. Chiropractors on Parade addresses the eclipse of D. D. by B. J. in leading both the proprietary school and the burgeoning chiropractic movement. It is in this climate of marginalization, I argue, that D. D. made his most elaborate religious turn, with the creation of the Third Chiropractic Theory.

Chapter 6, History Repeats turns full attention to B. J. Palmer, to show how his biography recapitulated situations faced by his father. B. J. offered himself as a cultural icon to the chiropractic profession and the American public, whether they wanted him or not. For those loyal to him, he was a cathectic symbol, a form who modeled their own experience, writ large on a big screen. Endowed with energy and creativity, B. J. was dispossessed of leadership when a rationalizing profession rejected proprietary models, especially B. J.’s autocratic claims to power. In later life he, like D. D. Palmer, made a spiritual turn that restored Metaphysical possibilities to Straight Chiropractic. When B. J. Palmer died in 1961, his son, David Daniel Palmer, was already managing most of the day-to-day operations at the PSC The death of his father allowed the younger Palmer to align the school with mainstream standards of education. With a series of decisive legal and policy victories, the profession also normalized its position in American society. The Palmers’ legacy and personas endure, however, in the Straight Chiropractic movement.

Chapter 7, The World of Chiropractic, focuses on the later twentieth century, and considers how the U.S. experience bears on the profession as chiropractic grows internationally in the new millennium. By the late 1990s chiropractic was viewed, for the most part, as a conventional form of health care in North America. I address the enduring role of vitalism and populism and return to the question of spirituality to show how metaphysics may bear on chiropractic as it takes root in other countries.

Much more work needs to be done on international issues surrounding alternative religion and medicine. I hope this monograph helps sketch the particular American contours of the profession in a way that is helpful to its international interpretation.

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,