Daniel David Palmer or D.D. Palmer (March 7, 1845 – October 20, 1913) was the founder of Chiropractic.
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Palmer was born in Pickering, near Toronto, Canada to Katherine McVay and Thomas Palmer.[1] At age twenty he moved to the United States with his family. Palmer held various jobs as a beekeeper, school teacher, and grocery store owner, and had an interest in the various health philosophies of his day, such as magnetic healing, and Spiritualism. Palmer practiced magnetic healing beginning in the mid-1880s in Burlington and Davenport, Iowa.
Palmer read medical journals of his time and followed developments throughout the world regarding anatomy and physiology. While working as a magnetic healer in Davenport, Iowa, he encountered a deaf janitor who he discovered had a palpable lump in his back. He theorized that the lump and his deafness were related. After a reported successful restoration of the man's hearing,[2] it led to the beginning of Chiropractic history. His theories revolved around the concept that altered nerve flow was the cause of all disease, and that misaligned spinal vertebrae had an effect on the nerve flow. He postulated that restoring these vertebra to their proper alignment would restore health.
Palmer founded a school based on his work that would become the Palmer School of Chiropractic in 1897. By 1902 the school had graduated 15 chiropractors. In 1906, Palmer was prosecuted under the new medical arts law in Iowa for practicing medicine without a license, and chose to go to jail instead of paying the fine. As a result, he spent 17 days in jail, but then elected to pay the fine. Shortly thereafter, he sold the school of chiropractic to his son, B. J. Palmer. With the help of an arbitration committee, the deal was settled for $2,196.79, various books, and some specimens from the osteological collection. As soon as the sale of the school was finalized, D.D. Palmer went to the West Coast, where he helped to found chiropractic schools in Oklahoma, California, and Oregon.
The relationship with his son BJ was tenuous and often bitter, especially after the sale of his school. Their subsequent disagreements regarding the direction of the emerging field of chiropractic were evident in D.D. Palmer's writings. Even the circumstances surrounding his death were postulated to be attributable to BJ. Court records reflect that during a founders day parade in Davenport in August 1913, DD was marching on foot and was allegedly struck from behind by a car driven by BJ. Others denied he was struck by BJ's vehicle. He died in Los Angeles, California on October 20, 1913. The official cause of death was typhoid fever, though some believe it was the consequence of his injuries. The courts exonerated BJ of any responsibility for his father's death.
D.D. Palmer's effort to find a single cause for all disease led him to say:
D.D. Palmer was a man with subjective and personal religious beliefs. As an active spiritist, he said he "received chiropractic from the other world"[3] from a deceased medical physician named Dr. Jim Atkinson.[4]
According to B. J. Palmer "Father often attended the annual Mississippi Valley Spiritualists Camp Meeting at Clinton, Iowa... That is where he first received messages from Dr. Jim Atkinson on the principles of chiropractic."[5] Such messages were normally received during seances, but Palmer claimed to have received them through "inspiration".[6]
In his book, The Chiropractor (published posthumously, 1914), Palmer described the situation:
He regarded chiropractic as partly religious in nature. In a letter of May 4, 1911 he said:
In his 1914 book, the first chapter expanded on his religious views of chiropractic: "The Moral and Religious Duty of a Chiropractor".[6] In it he dealt with religious liberty and stated:
Later in the book he distanced himself from actually renaming the profession to the "religion of chiropractic" and discussed the differences between a formal, objective religion and a personal, subjective ethical religious belief. (p. 6) He reaffirmed that chiropractors have a religious and moral duty, and ended the first chapter by stating:
Palmer met opposition and was accused of being a crank and a quack. An 1894 edition of the local paper, the Davenport Leader, wrote:
The 2008 book Trick or Treatment states that in 1913 B.J. Palmer ran over his father, D.D. Palmer, at a homecoming parade for the Palmer School of Chiropractic. A few weeks later D.D. Palmer died. The official cause of death was recorded as typhoid, but there was speculation that his death was a case of patricide. They had become bitter rivals over the leadership of chiropractic. B.J. Palmer resented his father for the way he treated his family, stating that his father beat three of his children with straps and was so much involved in chiropractic that he hardly known his children.[8] Chiropractic historian Joseph C. Keating, Jr. has described the attempted patricide of D.D. Palmer as a myth and "absurd on its face" and cites an eyewitness who recalled that DD was not struck by BJ's car, but rather, had stumbled. Keating stated "Joy Loban, DC, executor of DD's estate, voluntarily withdrew a civil suit claiming damages against B.J. Palmer, and that several grand juries repeatedly refused to bring criminal charges against the son."[9]
The following quotes are from D.D. Palmer's book, The Chiropractor's Adjuster (also called The Text-Book of the Science, Art and Philosophy of Chiropractic). The book was published in 1910 by the Portland Printing House Company of Portland, Oregon, and reprinted in 1966 by his grandson, David D. Palmer, 1966.
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