Daniel David Palmer

Early life

Palmer was born in the hamlet of Brown's Corners (later Audley) of Pickering Township, in what is now Ajax, Ontario. His parents were Thomas Palmer and Katherine McVay, and his great-great-grandparents were from the United States. He received formal education until the age of 11 years, at the Audley School, and was subsequently raised in Port Perry.

At age twenty, he moved to the United States with his family. Palmer held various jobs, including beekeeper, schoolteacher, and grocery store owner, and had an interest in the various health philosophies of his day, including magnetic healing and spiritualism. In 1870, Palmer was probably a student of metaphysics. Palmer practiced magnetic healing beginning in the mid-1880s in Burlington and Davenport, Iowa.

Founding of chiropractic

In 1895, Palmer was practicing magnetic healing from an office in Davenport when he encountered the building's janitor, Harvey Lillard. Lillard had a severe hearing impairment, and Palmer suggested that a noticeable lump on his back might be linked to it. Palmer then manipulated Lillard's back and claimed to have successfully restored his hearing, which would go on to be an influential claim in chiropractic history.

This account of how the first adjustment occurred would later be countered by Lillard's daughter, who recalls a different interaction between the two men as told to her by her father. She claims that Palmer overheard her father telling a joke just outside his office and joined the group to catch the end of it. Upon hearing the punchline, Palmer heartily slapped Lillard on the back. A few days later, Lillard remarked that his hearing had improved since the incident, inspiring Palmer to pursue vertebral manipulation as a means to cure illness.

In 1896, D. D. Palmer's first descriptions of underlying chiropractic philosophy were strikingly similar to Andrew Still's principles of osteopathy established a decade earlier. Both described the body as a "machine" whose parts could be manipulated to produce a drugless cure. Both professions advocated using spinal manipulation to treat joint dysfunction and enhance health. Chiropractors referred to this manipulable "lesion" as "vertebral subluxation," which they claimed interfered with the nervous system. In contrast, osteopaths labeled the spinal lesion as "somatic dysfunction," which they believed affected the circulatory system. Palmer drew further distinctions by noting that he was the first to use short-lever manipulative techniques using the spinous process and transverse processes as mechanical levers to spinal dysfunction (i.e., "subluxation"). Soon after, osteopaths began a nationwide campaign proclaiming chiropractic a bastardized form of osteopathy and sought licensure to differentiate the two groups. Although Palmer initially denied being trained by osteopathic medicine founder A. T. Still, in 1899, Palmer wrote:

His theories revolved around the concept that altered nerve flow was the cause of all disease, and that misaligned spinal vertebrae affected the nerve flow. He postulated that restoring these vertebrae to their proper alignment would restore health:

Spread of chiropractic

Palmer began teaching others his new treatment methods. In 1897, he founded the Palmer School and Cure in Davenport, later renamed Palmer College of Chiropractic. Among Palmer's early students was his son B.J. Palmer.

In 1906, Palmer was prosecuted under the new medical arts law in Iowa for practicing medicine without a license, and chose to go to jail instead of paying the fine. As a result, he spent 17 days in jail, but then elected to pay the fine. Shortly thereafter, he sold the school of chiropractic to his son. After the sale of the school was finalized, D. D. Palmer went to the Western United States, where he helped to found chiropractic schools in Oklahoma, California, and Oregon.

Palmer's beliefs

Spiritualism

As an active spiritist, D. D. Palmer said he "received chiropractic from the other world" from a deceased physician named Dr. Jim Atkinson.

According to his son B. J. Palmer, "Father often attended the annual Mississippi Valley Spiritualists Camp Meeting where he first claimed to receive messages from Dr. Jim Atkinson on the principles of chiropractic."

He regarded chiropractic as partly religious in nature. At various times, he wrote:

He distanced himself from actually renaming the profession to the "religion of chiropractic" and discussed the differences between a formal, objective religion and a personal, subjective ethical religious belief.(p. 6)

Magnetic healer

Like other drugless healers of the era, Palmer practised as a magnetic healer prior to founding chiropractic. Palmer sought to combine magnetic, scientific and vitalistic viewpoints as a drugless healer.

He met opposition throughout his life, including locally, and was accused of being a crank and a quack. An 1894 edition of the local paper, the Davenport Leader, wrote:

Anti-vaccination

Like his son, Palmer was anti-vaccines:

Quotes

• Disease: "The kind of dis-ease depends upon what nerves are too tense or too slack."
• Chiropractic for intellectual abnormalities: "Chiropractors correct abnormalities of the intellect as well as those of the body."'
• Life and religion: "I have answered the time-worn question—what is life?": "The dualistic system—spirit and body—united by intellectual life—the soul—is the basis of this science of biology"
• "There can be no healing without Teaching ..."
• "There is a vast difference between treating effects and adjusting the causes."

Personal life

Palmer was married six times.

1. Abba Lord, m. 1871
2. Louvenia Landers, m. 1874 – d. 1884
3. Lavinia McGee, m. 1876 – d. 1885
4. Martha A. Henning, m. 1885
5. Villa Amanda Thomas, m. 1888 – d. 1905
6. Molly Hudler ("Mary"), m. 1906

Death

The relationship with his son, B. J. Palmer, was tenuous and often bitter, especially after the sale of his school. Their subsequent disagreements regarding the direction of the emerging field of chiropractic were evident in D. D. Palmer's writings. B. J. Palmer resented his father for the way he treated his family, stating that his father beat three of his children with straps and was so much involved in chiropractic that "he hardly knew he had any children". Even the circumstances surrounding his death were postulated to be attributable to B. J.

Court records reflect that during a parade in Davenport in August 1913, D. D. was marching on foot when he was struck from behind by a car driven by B. J. He died in Los Angeles, California, on October 20, 1913. The official cause of death was typhoid fever, though some believe it was the consequence of his injuries. The courts exonerated B. J. of any responsibility for his father's death.

Chiropractic historian Joseph C. Keating, Jr. has described the attempted patricide of D. D. Palmer as a "myth" and "absurd on its face" and cites an eyewitness who recalled that D. D. was not struck by B. J.'s car but rather had stumbled. He also says that "Joy Loban, DC, executor of D. D.'s estate, voluntarily withdrew a civil suit claiming damages against B. J. Palmer, and that several grand juries repeatedly refused to bring criminal charges against the son."

References

References

1. (September 18, 2019). "Palmer College of Chiropractic honors its founder D. D. Palmer, with a new statue".
2. Keating, Joseph Jr.. (June 4, 2005). "The Palmers and the Port Perry Myths". [[Dynamic Chiropractic]].
3. [[Palmer College of Chiropractic]] Health Sciences Library. (March 1, 2022). "Daniel David Palmer".
4. (July 2, 2019). "The first chiropractor was a Canadian who claimed he received a message from a ghost".
5. John Robert Colombo. (2011). "Fascinating Canada". Dundurn Press.
6. (2003). "Spin Doctors: The Chiropractic Industry Under Examination". Dundurn Press.
7. (October 20, 1913). "Ancestry of Daniel David Palmer". Wargs.com.
8. Robert Hartmann McNamara. (2018). "Chiropractic Medicine: An Ethnographic Study". Lexington Books.
9. (2019). "Daniel David Palmer, the Father of Chiropractic: His Heritage Revisited". Chiropractic History.
10. Leach, Robert. (2004). "The Chiropractic Theories: A Textbook of Scientific Research". Lippincott, Williams and Wilkins.
11. "D.D. Palmer's Lifeline".
12. Palmer D. D., ''The Science, Art and Philosophy of Chiropractic''. Portland, Oregon: Portland Printing House Company, 1910.
13. "NCAHF Fact Sheet on Chiropractic (2001)". NCAHF.
14. (May 2008). "Chiropractic: a critical evaluation". Journal of Pain and Symptom Management.
15. "The Palmer Family".
16. [http://www.chiro.org/Plus/History/Persons/PalmerDD/PalmerDD's_Religion-of-Chiro.pdf D.D. Palmer's Religion of Chiropractic] – Letter from D. D. Palmer to P. W. Johnson, D.C., May 4, 1911. In the letter, he often refers to himself with [[Royal we. royal third person terminology]] and also as "Old Dad".
17. Keating J. [http://philosophyofchiropractic.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/10/FaultyLogic-in-Chiro.pdf Faulty Logic & Non-skeptical Arguments in Chiropractic] {{Webarchive. link. (November 2, 2013)
18. L. Ted Frigard, DC, PhC, [https://www.dynamicchiropractic.com/mpacms/dc/article.php?id=8996 Still vs. Palmer: A Remembrance of the Famous Debate], ''[[Dynamic Chiropractic]]'' – January 27, 2003, Vol. 21, Issue 03
19. (June 1994). "The Chiropractor". Health Research Books.
20. (Jul 2008). "Doctor Who? Inappropriate use of titles by some alternative "medicine" practitioners". The New Zealand Medical Journal.
21. (2005). "Chiropractic antivaccination arguments". J Manipulative Physiol Ther.
22. Gleberzon, Brian. (September 2013). "On Vaccination & Chiropractic: when ideology, history, perception, politics and jurisprudence collide". Journal of the Canadian Chiropractic Association.
23. Keating, Jr, Joseph. (April 13, 1998). "D.D. Palmer's Lifeline".
24. (2008). "Trick or Treatment: The Undeniable Facts about Alternative Medicine". W.W. Norton.
25. (1999). "Laid to uneasy rest: D.D. Palmer, 1913". Chiropr Hist.
26. Keating, Joseph. (April 23, 1993). "Dispelling Some Myths About Old Dad Chiro". [[Dynamic Chiropractic]].