Since ancient times humanity has recognized an intimate relationship between the spine and health. Spinal care and manipulation has been practiced for thousands of years in nearly all parts of the world. In ancient Greece, Hippocrates, called the “Father of Medicine”, was really a natural healer, stressing diet, exercise, natural remedies, and spinal adjustments as a means of curing diseases and maintaining health. As he said: “One or more vertebrae of the spine may…go out of place…they are likely to produce serious complications and even death, if not properly adjusted.”
 

Chiropractic as a science was founded in 1895 by Canadian Daniel David (D.D.) Palmer of Port Perry, Ontario who moved to Davenport, Iowa, the “home of Chiropractic”. He was a successful practitioner of magnetic healing, a popular form of natural health care in the United States, based on the premise that disease was the result of an imbalance in a person’s natural energies. During his practices, he noticed spinal misalignments in his patients and started to try to correct them by hand through manipulation. It was then he started to see a closer relationship between the spine and our health. He theorized that a misaligned vertebrae interfered with the function of the spinal nerves, thereby blocking the patient’s natural healing ability. Palmer then named his new “hand treatments." He took the Greek word for “hand”, cheir, and “done by”, praktos, and put them together. Chiropractic was thus born. Palmer began to research and refine the art, science, and philosophy of this new healing system, and founded the first and what is now the Palmer College of Chiropractic. D.D. was known as the “Discoverer,” while his son, Bartlett Joshua (B.J.), who succeeded him in leadership of the fledgling profession, became known as the “Developer” of chiropractic.

D.D. Palmer

B.J. Palmer

“We Chiropractors work with the sciences of the universe by turning on the life in man through the art of adjustment. We do not prescribe, treat or diagnose conditions. We use only our hands.  We work with the subtle substance of the soul. We release the prisoned impulse, the tiny rivulet of force, that emanates from the mind and flows over the nerves to the cells, and stirs them into life. We deal with the magic power that transforms a common food into living, loving, thinking clay; that robes the earth with beauty, and hues and scents the flowers with the glory of the air. In the dim, dark, distant long ago, when the sun first bowed to the morning star, this power spoke and there was life; it quickened the slime of the sea and the dust of the earth and drove the cell to union with its fellows in countless living forms. Through aeons of time it finned the fish and winged the bird and fanged the beast. Endlessly it worked, evolving its form until it produced the crowning glory of them all.

With tireless energy it blows the bubble of each individual life and then silently, relentlessly dissolves the form, and absorbs the spirit into itself again….And yet you ask, “Can Chiropractic cure appendicitis or the flu?” …Have you more faith in a knife of a spoonful of medicine than in the power that animates the living world?”

 B.J. Palmer, D.C., Ph.C.