The first
chiropractic adjustment was performed in Davenport, Iowa
in the year 1895 by a man named Daniel David
Palmer. D.D. Palmer was a frontier renaissance man. During his
lifetime, Palmer would be a school teacher, a farmer--developing a new variety
of raspberry, which he called "Sweet Home"--a grocer and eventually
practicing as a "Magnetic Healer"* in
Davenport for a number of years prior to founding chiropractic.
*Contrary to
what its name suggests, magnetic healing had nothing to do with magnets.
Rather it was a cross between massage and meridian therapies--which is based
upon the concepts of acupuncture and Chinese medicine. Magnetic healing rose
up as an alternative to main stream medicine at the end of the civil war. In
1895 it was still common for medical doctors to use blood letting as a method for
curing disease.
D.D.
Palmer's own words describing his magnetic healing practice...
"In 1886 I began as a business. Although
I practiced under the name of magnetic, I did not slap or rub, as others. I
questioned many M.D.s as to the cause of disease. I desired to know why such
a person had asthma, rheumatism, or other afflictions. I wished to know what
differences there were in two persons that caused on to have certain
symptoms called disease which his neighbor living under the same conditions
did not have...In my practice of the first 10 years which I named magnetic,
I treated nerves, followed and relieved them of inflammation. I made many
good cures, as many are doing today under a similar method."
As
the above quotation states, Palmer was interested in finding the true
cause(s) of disease. He wanted to know why two people who lived in the same
house, drank the same water, breathed the same air and often had the same
parents, could have two dramatically different constitutions, one being
healthy and free of disease and the other sickly. Palmer felt that there must
be something other than environmental factors influencing an individuals
health. His theory, was that this internal factor was the function
of the nervous system. On September 18, 1895, D.D. Palmer would have the chance to prove his theory.
Click here to read D.D. Palmer's own account of the first chiropractic adjustment.
