The founder of chiropractic, Daniel David Palmer, claimed he received the core principles of his new healing system from the spirit of a dead doctor. In his 1914 memoir, Palmer wrote that a “deceased physician” named Jim Atkinson communicated the foundational ideas about disease and spinal adjustment to him from the afterlife. This ghost story is not folklore or internet rumor. It comes directly from Palmer’s own words, and it sits at the center of one of the strangest origin stories in American healthcare.
The First Adjustment in 1895
The conventional origin story of chiropractic begins in September 1895 on Eleventh Street in Davenport, Iowa. D.D. Palmer performed what he called the first chiropractic adjustment on Harvey Lillard, a janitor who worked in the same building. Lillard had been deaf for 17 years, and Palmer believed the deafness came from an injury in his spine. Palmer manipulated a vertebra he felt was out of place, and Lillard reportedly experienced some improvement in his hearing.
That event is the moment chiropractic as a practice was born. But the ideas behind it, Palmer later admitted, came from somewhere far more unusual.
The Ghost of Dr. Jim Atkinson
Before he became the father of chiropractic, D.D. Palmer worked as a magnetic healer, a common occupation in late 19th-century America rooted in the Spiritualist movement. Spiritualism, which peaked in popularity during the mid-to-late 1800s, held that the living could communicate with the dead. Séances, mediums, and spirit contact were not fringe activities but mainstream cultural practices during this period.
Palmer was deeply embedded in this world. And in his 1914 memoir, he made an extraordinary claim: the philosophical framework for chiropractic had been given to him by an “intelligent spiritual being” he identified as Dr. Jim Atkinson, a deceased physician. Palmer wrote:
“The knowledge and philosophy given me by Dr. Jim Atkinson, an intelligent spiritual being . . . 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.”
Palmer wasn’t being metaphorical. He explicitly credited a spirit with providing the explanation for how spinal problems cause disease, the idea that would become the entire basis of chiropractic theory. He framed this communication as “inspiration” in the biblical sense, placing it alongside the way prophets claimed to receive divine knowledge.
Innate Intelligence: The Spiritual Core
The ghost story wasn’t an isolated quirk. It connected to the broader philosophy Palmer built around chiropractic, which was deeply spiritual from the start. Palmer’s central concept was something he called “Innate Intelligence,” which he defined as “the Soul, Spirit, or Spark of Life” that “controls and directs all the vital functions of human life.”
This wasn’t a scientific hypothesis. Palmer described Innate Intelligence as a piece of the divine residing inside every person. He wrote that “Innate is a segment of that Intelligence which fills the universe,” drawing a direct line between a cosmic, god-like force and the intelligence he believed operated within each human body. In Palmer’s view, this inner intelligence maintained health by perfectly coordinating all bodily functions. Disease happened when spinal misalignments, which he called “subluxations,” interfered with Innate Intelligence’s ability to do its work.
So the ghost of Jim Atkinson wasn’t just a colorful detail. The spirit supposedly revealed a worldview in which health was fundamentally a spiritual matter, with the spine serving as the physical channel through which divine intelligence flowed.
Palmer’s Push to Make Chiropractic a Religion
Palmer took the spiritual dimension seriously enough to consider making chiropractic an official religion. In his 985-page 1910 textbook, “The Chiropractor’s Adjuster,” he laid out what he called “The New Theology” of healing, describing chiropractic as founded upon a “religious plank” with Innate Intelligence at its center.
There was a practical motive here, too. Early chiropractors were routinely arrested and prosecuted for practicing medicine without a license. Classifying chiropractic as a religion could have offered legal protection under the First Amendment, similar to the shield that Christian Science enjoyed. Palmer positioned chiropractic as a middle ground between Christian Science and conventional medicine, insisting it uniquely integrated “spirit and matter.” He believed chiropractic could not be practiced effectively without this spiritual philosophy.
His son, B.J. Palmer, who took over the profession’s development and turned it into a major industry, ultimately rejected the religion strategy. B.J. decided against it on the grounds that chiropractic had no use for “a deity to which we can direct instructions of how to run the universe, or a soul to save for heaven or from hell.” The younger Palmer wanted mainstream credibility, and tying the profession to religious claims would have made that harder.
How the Profession Moved Past the Ghost
B.J. Palmer’s decision set the trajectory for how chiropractic would present itself for the next century. The ghost of Jim Atkinson gradually disappeared from the profession’s public narrative. Instead, the Harvey Lillard adjustment became the sanitized founding story: a practical demonstration of spinal manipulation producing a tangible result. The Spiritualist roots, the spirit communication, and the explicitly religious philosophy were quietly set aside.
Modern chiropractic is split on how to handle this history. Evidence-based chiropractors, sometimes called “mixers,” have moved firmly toward a musculoskeletal model grounded in anatomy and clinical research. They treat back pain, neck pain, and similar conditions using spinal manipulation alongside conventional rehabilitation techniques. For these practitioners, the Jim Atkinson story is an embarrassing relic with no bearing on current practice.
A smaller but vocal group of “straight” chiropractors still hold to versions of Palmer’s original philosophy. They maintain the concept of Innate Intelligence (though usually without the ghost) and believe that spinal adjustments can affect overall health, not just musculoskeletal complaints. Within chiropractic academia, papers published in journals like the Journal of Contemporary Chiropractic have openly examined what researchers call the “magical thinking” and “mysticism” embedded in the profession’s founding, urging the field to reckon with these origins rather than ignore them.
The ghost of Jim Atkinson remains one of the most remarkable and little-known details in the history of American healthcare. The founder of a profession that now treats tens of millions of patients annually credited a dead man’s spirit with giving him the idea in the first place. Whether that fact matters to someone visiting a chiropractor for lower back pain is debatable. But as a window into how chiropractic came to exist and why its philosophical identity has always been contested, the ghost story is impossible to separate from the rest.