Thurman Fleet

Thurman G. Fleet expanded chiropractic thinking to include the dimension of mind and spirit. A veteran of the First World War who, by his own account, long suffered from the effects of his war injuries and found no answer in conventional medicine, he turned to chiropractic and graduated around 1930/31 from the then San Antonio-based Texas Chiropractic College. In San Antonio he built a practice so sought-after that tradition tells of rerouted traffic and repeatedly enlarged premises.

In 1931 Fleet had an experience he himself described as an "illumination," from which he derived his life's work: Concept Therapy. Its central idea is the unity of the human being as a "triune" of body, mind and spirit — the conviction that physical health cannot be understood apart from one's mental and spiritual condition. This vitalistic view of the person stood close to the theosophically shaped philosophy of the Palmers and complemented chiropractic work on the spine with the significance of thought patterns and inner attitude. To illustrate this, Fleet invented the "Spinal Demonstrator," a movable model of the spine with which he made the importance of the spine visible to patients.

From the late 1930s Fleet began to pass his teaching on to chiropractors; in 1949 he founded the Concept-Therapy Institute in San Antonio, a non-profit educational organization at which his philosophy was taught for decades and whose study groups — the "On-The-Beam" clubs — developed into an international movement. His book Rays of the Dawn gathers his thoughts on health and living and is read to this day. Fleet, whose approach is regarded as an early forerunner of today's mind-body medicine, died in 1983 at the age of 88 and was buried with military honors at Fort Sam Houston National Cemetery.