Dolson Avenue Medical Celebrates the Anniversary of Chiropractic

The Story of Chiropractic
The year was 1895, the same year that x-rays were discovered. At that time, Health Care was provided by a diversity of unregulated and unlicensed professions, including osteopaths, magnetic healers and “medical” doctors. In those days, most medical education consisted of working as an “apprentice” for a medical doctor, and learning the craft by observation.

D.D. Palmer, the Father of Chiropractic, was a magnetic healer, with a huge practice in Davenport, Iowa. He had doubts about the “germ theory” as the complete explanation of the cause of all disease. After all, if germs could kill…wouldn’t we all be dead? He asked “how it was that 2 brothers could work in the same shop, eat the same food, sleep in the same bed, and one would succumb to a disease, while the other one would not”? D.D. Palmer gave the first chiropractic adjustment to Harvey Lillard, on September 18, 1895. According to D.D. Palmer, manipulation is the cure for all diseases for the human race.

His belief was that it was not just the “seed” (or germ) which was the cause. He felt that the “soil”, or the body’s own recuperative power was damaged, and that this controlled where we were on the continuum between health and “dis-ease”.

One day D.D. was talking with Harvey Lillard, the man who owned the janitor service in his building. Harvey was deaf. He mentioned to D.D. that years before, while lifting a heavy weight, he felt something “snap” at the base of his neck. It was several weeks later that his hearing started to fade.

D.D. was intrigued, and asked Harvey if he could examine his back. What he “felt” (and we now call this “palpation”) was that one of the upper thoracic bones was sticking out much more than the one above or below it. He explained to Harvey that he felt that this “bone out of place” could be causing pressure on his spinal cord, and that this might be the reason that Harvey was now deaf. He convinced Harvey to lie down on the couch, and placed his hands on the transverse processes of the bone and, as D.D. explained, “wracked (the bone) back into place”.

When Harvey got up, he stated that he could hear a horse-drawn cart down in the street! This was the first thing he had heard clearly in 17 years!

What an auspicious way for a profession to be born! Our “no drugs, no surgery” approach has remained true to D.D.’s plilosophy of the “seed and the soil”. What a chiropractor accomplishes with the adjustment of the spine, is to remove the impediment to the brain’s control of the body. We call that impediment, which interferes with nervous control, a “ subluxation”.