Odd this day
The day the first chiropractic ‘treatment’ was carried out, in which Daniel David Palmer — until that point a practitioner of “magnetic healing” — treated janitor Harvey Lillard’s deafness by fiddling about with his spine a bit to effect a miraculous cure.
Not that Odd This Day is in any way sceptical about this entirely genuine medical practice. Good heavens, no. Just because Edzard Ernst, MD, PhD, FRCP, FRCPEd wrote in the Journal of Pain and Symptom Management in 2008:
With the possible exception of back pain, chiropractic spinal manipulation has not been shown to be effective for any medical condition. Manipulation is associated with frequent mild adverse effects and with serious complications of unknown incidence. Its cost-effectiveness has not been demonstrated beyond reasonable doubt. The concepts of chiropractic are not based on solid science and its therapeutic value has not been demonstrated beyond reasonable doubt.
…I don’t think that need concern us. And the fact that Palmer wrote a letter in 1911 suggesting that chiropractic, is, in fact, a religion, and that he occupies the same place in it as
Christ, Mohamed, Jo. Smith [Mormonism], Mrs. Eddy [Christian Science], Martin Luther and other who have founded religions
…well, that all seems quite normal. As well as referring to himself in the third person throughout (using the phrase ‘Old Dad’), he added:
I am the fountain head
…which seems to me to be no cause for alarm. Not one bit. Indeed, I would go further and say that receiving “ideas from the other world” is to be encouraged, and that the world would be a better place if more scientific advances were made by people who are dead.
By which I mean that, in the words of Palmer’s son, Bartlett Joshua (B.J.) Palmer:
Father often attended the annual Mississippi Valley Spiritualists Camp Meeting at Clinton, Iowa. That is where he first received messages from Dr. Jim Atkinson on the principles of chiropractic.
Atkinson had by that time been dead for some five decades. In other words, Palmer didn’t invent the practice. It was handed down to him from The Other Side in much the same way that other great benefits to humankind have been. The Church of Latter-Day Saints, for example. And the news that Oscar Wilde was rampantly heterosexual.
Palmer was also an early opponent of vaccination, writing in his 1910 book The Chiropractor’s Adjustor:
It is the very height of absurdity to strive to ‘protect’ any person from smallpox or any other malady by inoculating them with a filthy animal poison… No one will ever pollute the blood of any member of my family unless he cares to walk over my dead body to perform such an operation.
One would hope so. This is a movement, after all, which has brought together the finest minds in the world — Naomi Wolf, Donald Trump, and Right Said Fred, to cite just a few examples — making its points inarguable. Now that we know that these same points were being made over a century ago by a hero of medicine, it only adds weight to them. I don’t think the small fact that smallpox was eliminated by vaccination in 1980 need concern us here. No, when we read that Palmer’s grandson described his grandfather’s treatment in the following terms:
He would develop a sense of being positive within his own body; sickness being negative. He would draw his hands over the area of the pain and with a sweeping motion stand aside, shaking his hands and fingers vigorously, taking away the pain as if it were drops of water.
… I think that’s when we know we’re in the presence of something special, something mysterious that goes beyond such trivialities as scientific proof.
It was Palmer’s considered opinion — one that, of course, had nothing to do with the notion of making money from the credulous — that almost all disease was caused by ‘subluxations’, which happen when bits of the spine get out of place, cause nerve pressure, and make it difficult for messages to flow between brain and body. Let the cynics who think that manipulating a spine might be useful for a sore back and not much else forever hold their peace.
Interestingly, there are different factions in chiropractic. There are those who subscribe to the mystical stuff, and those who don’t, and they fight like the People’s Front of Judea and the Judean People’s Front. (Which makes chiropractic sound a bit like the UK’s Labour Party, except that that has some adults in it, who sometimes achieve things.)
No, let us have no more criticism of a man who was modest, selfless, and only wanted to help people. And who called himself ‘doctor’ and was jailed in 1906 for practising medicine without a license.
Let us rather celebrate a very great man — who sadly departed this life in 1913 of a bacterial infection which was common at the time. As one reprehensibly cynical Canadian publication observed:
Apparently, there was no miraculous adjustment for typhoid.
