Marketplace of the Marvelous (36 page)

Women found a particularly warm welcome in the American School of Osteopathy, which advertised for female students and practitioners with blatant flattery. In 1895, the
Journal of Osteopathy
declared that “the science of osteopathy should particularly appeal to the intelligent and ambitious women who desire a noble life-work which will prepare them for a future free of pecuniary concern.”
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It was a message squarely in line with the tenor of the late-nineteenth-century women's rights movement, which embraced women's economic independence as a means to equality.
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Still's passion for women's rights was so strong and so genuine that he frequently suggested the US Constitution needed an equal rights amendment to grant and assure the rights and privileges women clearly deserved. Still held his female students to the same standards as the men. The school catalog clearly stated there would be “no distinction as to sex,” and Still assured any doubters that all his women graduates were “as well worthy diplomas as any gentlemen who ever entered.”
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Still welcomed women, in part, from a desire to reform obstetrical care, an oft-repeated rallying cry among nineteenth-century irregulars. He particularly wanted to remove forceps from the birthing room because he believed they lacerated women and caused “many fools and idiots among children to-day.”
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Still had performed osteopathic deliveries himself, placing the mother in a semi-upright position and using manipulations, particularly of the pelvic bones, to make the labor brief and as pain-free as possible, but he felt women might perform these duties more effectively and empathetically. One of Still's early graduates, Alice Patterson, became head of the American School of Osteopathy's Department of Obstetrics and Gynecology, which had its own infirmary. Patterson later moved to Washington, DC, and built a successful osteopathic practice of her own.
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Among the many who came to Kirksville to learn osteopathy was Daniel David Palmer, though he would later deny any contact with
Still. The similarity of osteopathy and chiropractic led some to charge that Palmer's system was simply a cheap imitation, an accusation that Palmer strenuously denied and that likely led him to refute any connection or exposure to Still. Osteopaths were only too happy to deny an association with Palmer as well, since if there was anything an osteopath hated more than a regular doctor, it was a chiropractor. Palmer recognized that the two systems shared similar features, but he rejected osteopathy's focus on the blood. Instead, he believed the nerve force was essential to health.

Born in a log cabin in Port Perry, Ontario, Canada, on March 7, 1845, Palmer was the son of a man who worked variously as a shoemaker, grocer, teacher, and postmaster. When his father's business failed in 1856, the family moved to the United States for a new start. Palmer and his brother Thomas dropped out of school and stayed behind in Canada to work, finally joining their family in Iowa in 1865. The young Palmer became a teacher in Muscatine, Iowa, and taught at several more schools before purchasing ten acres of land on a hillside above the Mississippi River just north of New Boston, Illinois. He raised bees, planted fruit trees, and began a new career as a horticulturalist, even developing a variety of raspberry known as “Sweet Home” that found a national market. Palmer's bees perished in the harsh winter of 1881, so Palmer sold the land and rejoined his family, now living in the Iowa town of What Cheer. He opened a grocery store that also sold goldfish, but competition forced him out of the grocery business and back into the classroom.
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But teaching, while practical and nearly always in demand, did not fire Palmer's passion. Spiritualism had first interested Palmer in the 1870s, but he soon shifted his attention to magnetism, the reverse course of many mesmerists, who subsequently became spiritualists earlier in the century. Palmer's interest stemmed in large measure from local magnetic healer Paul Caster in Ottumwa, Iowa, who had impressed Palmer with his reputation, his bustling practice, and perhaps most important of all, his massive fortune. After Caster's death, his son J. S. inherited the business and took the practice to Burlington, Iowa, in 1881. Palmer followed, hoping to ride the young Caster's coattails to monetary gain. He read books on magnetic healing, fascinated by the idea of drugless cures, and he became convinced that he possessed the gift of healing—that he could literally pour his own “vital magnetism” or life force into diseased patients to effect a cure.
He placed advertisements for his healing services in local newspapers. That Palmer lacked a formal education, not to mention actual training or experience in magnetism, was no barrier to medical practice. The competition in Burlington proved too intense, however, and Palmer moved to Davenport, Iowa, in 1887 to establish his own magnetic healing practice.
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Palmer opened his Magnetic Cure and Infirmary in the Ryan Building on the corner of Second and Brady streets with an aggressive advertising campaign. “Where can you get cured quicker and for less money, and without making a drugstore of yourself? It may not be popular to be cured without medication, [but] who cares so [long as] the sick will get well?” read Palmer's ad in the 1888
Davenport Directory
. His “vital healing” services cost one dollar but were offered free to the poor.
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Palmer treated everything from rheumatism and neuralgia to indigestion, sore throats, and toothaches using his hands to draw away the pain and disease from the problem area with a sweeping motion. He then stood aside and shook the illness from his hands and fingers, as if shaking off droplets of water.
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Palmer's business flourished. His location by the Mississippi River allowed him to draw a client base from all over Illinois, Minnesota, Iowa, and Wisconsin. With his deep, penetrating eyes, feisty, self-assured manner, and scruffy bush of a beard just this side of menacing, he cut a commanding figure, as the original magnetist Franz Anton Mesmer had more than a century before. Palmer's was a personality far larger than his short and stocky five-foot-four-inch frame.
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Many patients were lured to his office by his widely distributed ads touting miraculous cures: Jane Wilson of a decades-long sore throat; Ella Post of malaria.
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By the 1890s, Palmer was seeing ninety to one hundred patients daily, and in 1895 recorded profits of $4,669 at a time when the average regular doctor made less than $1,500 annually.
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His space had also grown from its original three rooms to forty-two by 1891, decorated with mounted animal heads and a glass-walled cage, home to four live alligators.
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Palmer's success convinced him of the validity of drugless approaches to healing and the importance of the spine, nerve power, and the doctor's touch to wellness, but he began to wonder about the relationship between the body's structure and its physiological function. These questions all led up to his September 18, 1895, encounter with janitor Henry Lillard and the adjustment that changed everything for
Palmer. It should be noted that Lillard remembered the events of that night a little differently than Palmer. Lillard recalled laughing with a friend in the hallway. The conversation, loud enough for Palmer to hear it, drew Palmer from his office to join in the banter. One joke struck Palmer as so funny that he slapped the janitor on the back with a book. A few days later, Lillard reported that he thought his hearing had improved. Only then did Palmer begin to explore manipulation as medicine.
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Whatever happened, that day proved pivotal to Palmer, who declared a connection between Lillard's back and his deafness, and he soon shifted his attention from magnetism to manipulation.

Over the following months, Palmer experimented with what he called “hand treatments” on other patients with success. Realizing he needed a better name for his system, Palmer turned to Davenport minister and patient Samuel Weed for help. Weed suggested “chiropractic” from the Greek
cheir
meaning “hand” and
praxis
for “practice,” meaning roughly “done by hand.”
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With a name, he also needed a theory to explain what he had discovered through experimentation. What he came up with married the vitalism of magnetism to the mechanical aspects of bonesetting.
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Palmer reasoned that all diseases resulted from some kind of spinal “impingement, a pressure on the nerves” that enervates the organs. Normal nerve tension, which he called tone, produced a perfect state of health, but if some bone, most often in the spine, imposed on nerves passing through it, they became too slack or too tense, resulting in disease. This point of pressure was called a subluxation. The idea of disease resulting from nerve dysfunction would make sense even to regulars. In the eighteenth century, Scottish physician William Cullen, the same man who had inspired homeopath Samuel Hahnemann, had theorized that disease resulted from a decrease of “nervous energy.” Benjamin Rush modified Cullen's theory, claiming that disease came from both an increase and a decrease in nervous energy, and popularized it among American regulars. It was Palmer's interpretation of how that nerve dysfunction originated that made chiropractic unique.
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Using the magnetic idea of an internal physical force, Palmer explained that every living being possessed an eternal power known as “Innate Intelligence,” or just “Innate,” which animated every function of the body. This Innate circulated through the nerves, so a subluxation
that caused impingement could disrupt its ability to govern the body and cause illness.
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Since the nerves branched out from the spine, Palmer focused much of his attention on the alignment of the vertebrae. Palmer came to believe that 95 percent of diseases originated in the spine, so it was the chiropractors' job to facilitate the flow of nerve force, and the all-important Innate, through physical adjustments. Drugs were unnecessary because they did not solve the actual structural problem, and they might actually cause more problems with their harsh effects. Healing required nothing more than a resetting that, once accomplished, like osteopathy, allowed the body to restore itself.
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“The Chiropractor removes the obstacles to nature's healing process,” Palmer proclaimed.
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It also did much more than just return people to health. Palmer believed that his system could usher in the dawning of a new age by answering age-old questions about the meaning of life, disease, and death. Crime, poverty, and suffering were all diseased conditions that could be cured through the free flow of Innate. Palmer frequently referred to how the impingement of nerves created a lack of ease or “dis-ease” that was the cause of all human problems. Sounding like the spiritualist he once was, Palmer believed that chiropractic would “give us a conscious connection with that unseen life which is believed in by all nations,” allowing humans to stop fearing death “because the life beyond the veil will be comprehended and known to us.”
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For a time, Palmer and his son, Bartlett Joshua Palmer, or B. J., as he was commonly known and who would eventually assume leadership of the profession, even considered classifying chiropractic as a religion rather than a new healing system due to its potential impact on humanity.
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In the end, they decided to stick with medicine, reflecting their belief that chiropractic stood on sensible middle ground between the spiritualism of religion and the materialism of science. At a time when American culture was uncertain about the appropriate relationship between science, which was on the rise, and religion, which appeared to many to be losing its authority, chiropractors argued that they alone had discovered the perfect balance between them in a philosophy that dealt with “manifestations of the spiritual through the material physical body.”
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Still, too, saw God in osteopathy. “God's greatest gift is Osteopathy,” wrote Still. “God is the Father of Osteopathy and I am not ashamed of the child of his mind.”
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For the son of a Methodist minister
who also practiced medicine, Still's conflation of osteopathy and religion is, perhaps, none too surprising. Still saw the human body as worthy of awe and devotion, an intricate piece of machinery divinely designed. Adjusting the body became a form of devotion for him.
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“My highest and most profound worship is when I take up any part of the human body or any part of nature, and after examining it under the microscope, I give credit for all perfection to the great Architect,” proclaimed Still in a 1903 speech.
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Both Still and Palmer trusted in nature's healing power because they saw the beauty and complexity of nature as something only God could have created. Each of their systems was an attempt to harmonize the spiritual with the physical.
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Chiropractors discovered subluxations in the same manner as their regular and osteopathic peers: with a patient history. Like osteopaths, chiropractors did not believe that the symptoms of the disease were the disease; they were, instead, secondary manifestations of the problem. After locating the afflicted area, Palmer instructed practitioners to consider the nerves connected to that area and to then trace those nerves back to the part of the spine from which they emanate. Confirmation of the subluxation came by touch.
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Specific ailments corresponded to individual vertebrae, so there would never be more than one impingement per disease. Smallpox, for instance, came from the fifth cervical vertebra, while heartburn emanated from the fifth thoracic.
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The removal of the subluxation through manipulation was officially known in chiropractic as an
adjustment
, a term osteopaths used as well, though not formally. Adjustments began with the patient lying face down on the adjusting table, a bench with a hole in the middle over which the chiropractor would position the blocked part of the body. The chiropractor would then stand on the side of the body where the vertebrae had been displaced. Resting the heel of his right hand against the vertebrae while wrapping his left hand around his right wrist, the chiropractor would apply enough pressure to move the vertebrae back into place. Palmer stressed that great force was not generally required, though it was up to each chiropractor to determine how much force was enough.
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