Chiropractic was born on September 18, 1895, in Davenport, Iowa, when a self-taught healer named Daniel David Palmer performed a spinal manipulation on a janitor and claimed it restored the man’s hearing. From that single event, Palmer built a theory, a school, and eventually an entire profession that now operates in every U.S. state. The path from that small office in Iowa to mainstream acceptance was messy, contentious, and shaped as much by courtroom battles as by clinical practice.
D.D. Palmer and the First Adjustment
Before he ever touched a spine, Palmer made his living as a “magnetic healer,” a common practice in late 19th-century America that involved passing hands over the body to channel healing energy. He had no formal medical training, but he studied anatomy extensively and was deeply influenced by spiritualism, a popular movement at the time. Palmer later claimed that the core principles of his new healing system had been communicated to him by the spirit of a deceased physician named Jim Atkinson.
The patient who changed everything was Harvey Lillard, a janitor who worked in Palmer’s building. Lillard told Palmer he had been deaf for 17 years, so deaf he couldn’t hear a wagon rumbling down the street. Palmer examined Lillard’s spine, found what he believed was a displaced vertebra, and pushed it back into position. The story goes that Lillard’s hearing improved. Whether or not that account is medically accurate, it became the founding narrative of chiropractic. Palmer saw it as proof that spinal misalignments could disrupt the body’s function, and he spent the rest of his life building a philosophy around that idea.
Where the Name Comes From
The word “chiropractic” was suggested by one of Palmer’s early patients, a man named Samuel Weed. It combines two Greek roots: cheir, meaning “hand,” and praktos, meaning “done.” Literally, “done by hand.” By 1897, Palmer had formally incorporated his magnetic healing background with his spinal manipulation techniques under this new name, establishing chiropractic as a distinct practice.
The Philosophy Behind It
Palmer didn’t just develop a technique. He built an entire worldview around it. At its center was a concept he called “Innate Intelligence,” which he described as a kind of inborn vital force present in every living being. In Palmer’s framework, Innate Intelligence was responsible for running the body’s functions, sending information through the nervous system to keep everything working. He saw it as something close to a spiritual essence, writing that it was the force that “runs the material body as long as it is habitable.”
Palmer proposed that the nervous system was the bridge between this spiritual force and the physical body. When vertebrae shifted out of alignment (what he called “subluxations”), they interfered with nerve communication, and the body’s ability to heal and regulate itself broke down. The chiropractor’s job was to find and correct those misalignments, restoring the flow of Innate Intelligence. This was not a minor philosophical footnote. Palmer described chiropractic as founded on a triad of “Innate, soul, and body,” and he considered the spiritual dimension to be fundamental to the profession’s identity.
B.J. Palmer and the Split
Palmer’s son, Bartlett Joshua Palmer, took over the family’s growing chiropractic operation in Davenport, Iowa, after a bitter falling-out drove D.D. Palmer from the city in 1902. B.J. Palmer became president of the Palmer School of Chiropractic, which he branded as the “chiropractic fountainhead,” and he held tightly to his father’s original vision. In B.J.’s view, chiropractic should remain focused exclusively on spinal adjustments. No drugs, no surgery, no blending with other therapies.
Not everyone agreed. As the profession grew, a faction of chiropractors began incorporating other treatments: physical therapy, nutrition, exercise, and diagnostic tools borrowed from mainstream medicine. This created a lasting divide between “straights” and “mixers.” Straights, championed by B.J. Palmer, stuck to spinal adjustments only. Mixers embraced a broader toolkit. By the mid-20th century, most chiropractors leaned toward the mixer approach, but the philosophical tension between the two camps shaped the profession’s identity for decades and, in some circles, still does.
The Fight for Legal Recognition
For much of the 20th century, chiropractors operated in a legal gray zone. Kansas became the first state to pass a chiropractic law in 1913, though full licensure wasn’t achieved there until 1915 after a combination of legal maneuvering by chiropractic advocates and missteps by the state medical board. Other states followed slowly, and chiropractors were frequently arrested for practicing medicine without a license during the early decades of the profession.
The most significant legal battle came in 1976, when a group of chiropractors led by Chester Wilk filed an antitrust lawsuit against the American Medical Association. The chiropractors argued that the AMA, along with the American Hospital Association and other medical societies, had conspired to restrict their business practices and shut them out of the healthcare system. The case dragged through the courts for more than a decade before the Seventh Circuit Court of Appeals ruled in favor of the chiropractors in 1990. That decision forced the medical establishment to stop actively boycotting chiropractic and opened the door for chiropractors to practice in hospitals, receive insurance reimbursement, and collaborate with physicians.
From Subluxation Theory to Modern Practice
The original idea that a “bone out of place” pressing on a nerve could cause disease was central to D.D. Palmer’s thinking, and for decades it remained chiropractic’s defining concept. The chiropractic definition of subluxation has always differed from the medical one. In medicine, a subluxation means a significant structural displacement visible on imaging. In chiropractic, the term has traditionally referred to something subtler: a spinal segment with improper motion or position that affects nerve communication between the brain and body, causing muscles to spasm and joints to lock up.
That traditional model remains controversial. The vertebral subluxation complex, as it’s formally known, is considered a theoretical model that lacks supporting clinical research evidence for claims that it causes disease. Many modern chiropractors have moved away from the subluxation framework entirely, focusing instead on evidence-based treatment of musculoskeletal pain, particularly low back pain, neck pain, and headaches. Others still hold to Palmer’s original philosophy. This internal disagreement is, in many ways, the same straight-versus-mixer debate that began over a century ago, just updated for a world that increasingly demands clinical evidence.