D.D. Palmer

Daniel David Palmer is regarded as the founder of chiropractic. Born in 1845 in what was then British Canada, he emigrated to the United States at the age of twenty and worked as a schoolteacher, beekeeper, fruit grower and grocer before settling in Davenport, Iowa, as a magnetic healer. During these years he became increasingly preoccupied with a question that would become the starting point of his life's work: why some people fall ill while others, under seemingly identical conditions, remain well.

On September 18, 1895, Palmer performed the adjustment remembered as the birth of chiropractic. He treated a janitor named Harvey Lillard, who by his own account had been hard of hearing for years, with a specific thrust to a vertebra of the spine. Palmer interpreted the improvement that followed as evidence for his thesis that misalignments of the spine — which he called "subluxations" — disturb nerve function and thereby the body's self-regulation. From this observation he developed a distinct concept that saw the spine as the key to "Innate Intelligence" — the life force inherent in the body that maintains health when the nervous system can work undisturbed.

In 1897 Palmer founded the Palmer School of Chiropractic in Davenport, forerunner of today's Palmer College of Chiropractic. The name "chiropractic" — from the Greek cheiro (hand) and praktikos (doing) — was coined by the Reverend Samuel Weed. In 1910 Palmer set out his teaching in The Science, Art and Philosophy of Chiropractic, a work that continues to shape the profession as a vitalistic foundation: the idea that healing comes from within and that the chiropractor's task is to clear the body's path to it.

Palmer's career was marked by conflict with organized medicine; in 1906 he was sentenced to a prison term for practicing medicine without a license. Shortly afterward he handed the school to his son, Bartlett Joshua (B.J.) Palmer, who would build chiropractic into a worldwide movement. D.D. Palmer went on to found further schools in Oklahoma and Oregon and died in Los Angeles in 1913. His legacy is not merely a method of treatment but a distinct philosophy of health that places the body's own healing powers at its center.