While many will be aware that Daniel David Palmer – the inventor of chiropractic – claims to have discovered the discredited back-cracking technique while curing a deaf janitor, the pseudoscience at the heart of the chiropractic story doesn’t stop there.
Daniel David Palmer was born in what is now Ajax, Ontario on March 7, 1845. His father, Thomas Palmer, raised Daniel in the biblical literalism of the Seventh Day Adventists, moving his family to Ohio in 1865 to follow job opportunities. By his late 20s, Daniel David, or ‘DD’, had renounced his faith, declaring himself an atheist. He tried his hand unsuccessfully at a range of jobs, including beekeeping, fruit farming, and running a grocery store. He also married three times in five years – first to Abba Lord in 1871, then to Louvenia Landers in 1874, followed by his wedding to his housekeeper Lavinia McGee in 1876.
His marriage to Abba Lord was eventually annulled in 1877, but of the three it’s certainly the most interesting, and arguably had the greater impact on his subsequent life and work. Abba Lord was a spiritualist medium when she met and married DD Palmer in 1871. She was also just 13 years old. By the time she met Palmer, Lord had worked the lucrative commercial mediumship market for at least a year, offering soul readings, psychometry, handwriting analysis, clairvoyance, and even spiritual advice on how to bring up children – ironic, given her age and career.
At the time of their marriage, DD claimed to be skeptical of mediumship – which does somewhat raise the question as to what drew him to the psychic 13-year-old. Palmer wrote in 1872:
I was a disbeliever in psychometry, clairvoyance and all mediumistic phenomena, and I had satisfied myself it was a delusive humbug, and fancied that I should have no trouble to convince my equal partner that such was the case; for she was so purely honest that I knew she would not practice a knowing deception.
This apparent skepticism led to Palmer to put Lord’s psychic ability to the test – a test he felt she passed convincingly. From that same 1872 letter:
I patiently waited to inform her of the failures to guess correctly. During the first week she diagnosed ten cases of disease without a single failure, all of which were unknown to her previously. This was too good for guessing and I was compelled to acknowledge one humbug as truth.
From here, it seems, Palmer’s skepticism was gone (and with it, his atheistic doubt of an afterlife):
I soon found I could put her in a mesmeric sleep — willing her to awake at any time desired by me, whether present or absent, and send her spirit or intelligence to any place however distant, leaving it with her when to return, which was usually about five minutes, — then her apparently lifeless body would be reanimated, telling me more or less what she had seen and heard while absent.
It is worth dwelling on this period of Palmer’s life a little, as it implies he was either taken in by the tween charlatan he had married… or that he was willing to imply as much in his writing. Either way, it gives us some invaluable context to the next chapters of Palmer’s life, once Lord had moved on, several marriages later, when a harsh Midwestern winter killed off Palmer’s bee business: Palmer reinvented himself as a magnetic healer, before founding the chiropractic movement.
As the story goes, Palmer was practicing magnetic healing in his office in Davenport when he noticed that the building’s janitor, Harvey Lillard, had a severe hearing impairment. Palmer decided that such deafness had to be related to the presence of a lump he noticed on the janitor’s back, which he began to treat. Once the lump was treated, the deafness was miraculously cured, and chiropractic was born.
Unsurprisingly, Lillard’s family tell a slightly different story – that Palmer overheard Lillard telling a joke outside his office, and joined the group just in time to catch the end of it, and at the punchline, he slapped Lillard on the back in a hearty 19th Century expression of amused camaraderie… and then several days later, Lillard remarked that his hearing had improved. Neither his deafness nor his subsequent recovery were documented in any measurable way, but on such scant foundations, a pseudoscientific empire was built.
As a result of this encounter, Palmer decided that spinal lesions – which he began to call subluxations – were responsible for 95% of anything that might go wrong with the human body… and that the other 5% was due to displaced joints elsewhere in the body. His reasoning was that the spine was a superhighway for what he called “innate energy”, which told the body how to be healthy, but when that energy hit a subluxation, it would prevent that energy from arriving, and the body would go haywire in its absence.
This was, of course, untrue, but it wasn’t even new untruths – people soon noticed that what he was suggesting was incredibly similar to Andrew Still’s principles of osteopathy, invented a decade earlier. Initially, Palmer denied having any knowledge of osteopathy, but in 1899 he finally admitted that he had taken some osteopathy classes in the past, but they weren’t the inspiration for chiropractic. Instead, as he explained in 1910, he had learned about the fundamentals of chiropractic from Dr Jim Atkinson… who was a spirit he talked to via a medium. As Palmer wrote in his book, “The Chiropractor”:
The knowledge and philosophy given me by Dr. Jim Atkinson, an intelligent spiritual being, together with explanations of phenomena, principles resolved from causes, effects, powers, laws and utility, appealed to my reason. The method by which I obtained an explanation of certain physical phenomena, from an intelligence in the spiritual world, is known in biblical language as inspiration. In a great measure The Chiropractor’s Adjuster was written under such spiritual promptings.
In fact, by this point Palmer was professing to be so explicitly religious that he would talk of chiropractic as a religion – a religion that required him to be the leader. Writing in 1911, he compared himself to Mary Baker Eddy, who twenty years previous had founded the Christian Science movement:
Mrs. Eddy claimed to receive her ideas from the other world and so do I. She founded theron a religion, so may I. I am THE ONLY ONE IN CHIROPRACTIC WHO CAN DO SO…. We must have a religious head, one who is the founder, as did Christ, Muhammad, Jo. Smith, Mrs. Eddy, Martin Luther and others who have founded religions. I am the fountain head. I am the founder of chiropractic in its science, in its art, in its philosophy and in its religious phase.
Those block capitals are present in Palmer’s original letter – he was extremely clear that no other person could lay claim to being the head of the chiropractic movement. The reason for his agitation? He was not the only Palmer looking to run the family business.
BJ Palmer
Bartlett Joshua Palmer, or “BJ” Palmer, was the son of DD’s third wife, Lavinia. BJ was at least as committed to chiropractic as his father, having been one of the first students to attend the Palmer College of Chiropractic in Davenport, which DD had founded in 1897. The two men did not see eye to eye on much – a disagreement that was at least in part rooted in DD’s treatment of his children after Lavinia died in 1885. BJ wrote that his father would beat him and his sisters with straps so severely that DD would sometimes be arrested, and spent nights in jail:
Our older sister was badly injured and has been sickly all her life. Our younger sister had a severe abscess caused by beatings. We have a fractured vertebra and a bad curvature from same source.
Aside from the regular beatings, DD didn’t have much time for his children – most of his time was spent growing the chiropractic movement. Although, it’s worth pointing out, DD did find time to take three more wives – Martha Henning in 1885. Villa Amanda Thomas in 1888 and finally Molly Hudler in 1906.
1906 was a big year for DD Palmer, because it was the year that the law came knocking: Iowa had recently passed a new medical arts law against practicing medicine without a license, essentially to clampdown on charlatans like the Palmers, and DD was the first chiropractor they prosecuted. Despite having more than enough money to pay the fine – and, more to the point, having enough acolytes who would have been willing to pay the fine on his behalf – he elected instead to play the martyr and serve 17 days in jail, no doubt hoping that the resulting publicity would help spread the message of chiropractic, and of its founder so committed to his ideals he was willing to be imprisoned for them.
Things didn’t quite work out as he hoped, and upon his emergence from prison, he had a falling out with his son which resulted in him selling the chiropractic college to BJ and heading out West, founding new schools in Oklahoma, California and Oregon… all of which failed, while BJ’s practices flourished. The disparity in success soured the relationship between father and son even further, and the pair soon became rivals. DD would write in criticism of the direction BJ was taking the chiropractic movement, even giving lectures to opposing chiropractic colleges. Then, in August 1913, DD was marching on foot in a parade in Davenport when he was struck from behind by a car, injuring him sufficiently that he never really recovered. The driver of that car? BJ Palmer.
DD Palmer died two months later, in LA. While the official cause of death was listed as typhoid, some saw foul play. As the book Trick or Treatment explains:
it seems more likely that his death was a direct result of injuries caused by his son. Indeed, there is speculation that this was not an accident, but rather a case of patricide.
With DD Palmer now fully out of the picture, the chiropractic movement grew and grew under BJ Palmer, becoming the pseudoscience we know today. Along the way, BJ had a son of his own, and named him David Daniel Palmer, who himself went on to become a leading chiropractor, giving himself the nickname “The Educator”.
In 1922, the Palmers bought a radio station to market their chiropractic industry, as well as broadcasting weather reports and sports updates – rather incredibly, the young sports journalist they hired to fulfil that role in 1932, was a 21-year-old Ronald Reagan.
To this day, Daniel David Palmer remains revered by chiropractors as an inspirational and visionary figure. DD was a man born into a deeply religious movement, who recognised it was all nonsense, until he met a barely-teenaged con artist who pushed him back into belief… or, perhaps, a willing collaborator who eagerly took on board the tricks of the trade, how to sell a con successfully, and how much money and influence could be gained from dishonesty.
Over a century later, the pseudoscientific ideas he promoted – whether handed to him by helpful ghosts or plagiarised from osteopaths – have become a worldwide industry that’s globally and erroneously synonymous with spinal health, cementing a legacy that enriched, empowered and ultimately divided three generations of his family.
