Leo Spears

Leo Spears was one of the most combative and consequential pioneers of early chiropractic. Born into modest circumstances in rural Florida, he graduated from the Palmer School of Chiropractic in 1921 and opened a practice in Denver, Colorado, that same year. As a student he is said to have spoken of one day building a chiropractic hospital — a vision that would define his life's work. He later summarized his full-spine method under the name "Spears Painless System" and set it out in a textbook in 1950.

His enduring work is institutional in nature: in 1933 he founded the Spears Free Clinic and Hospital for Poor Children, from which, beginning in 1940, the Spears Chiropractic Sanitarium and Hospital emerged — with two buildings (dedicated to the pioneer Willard Carver and to D.D. Palmer respectively) and several hundred beds, by far the largest hospital in the history of the profession. Over the years the facility provided, by estimates, free services worth several million dollars, particularly for children in need.

Spears's career was marked by decades of legal battles with the medical licensing authorities. The most consequential was his fight over the hospital's operating license: after a seven-year dispute, the Colorado Supreme Court ruled in 1950 that chiropractic could not be arbitrarily disadvantaged and that its practitioners were entitled to operate facilities for treatment according to their own principles — an important precedent for the profession's independence. Spears remained a controversial figure whose sweeping public statements were sharply criticized in his lifetime. After his death in 1956, his nephews carried on the institution; the hospital existed until 1984.