CHIROPRACTIC ARTICLES & TIPS

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WIND BACK THE CLOCK - THE HISTORY OF CHIROPRACTIC

This newsletter I thought you all might be interested in a bit of history behind the origin of chiropractic! It won‘t be a long history lesson, however perhaps over the next few issues I will include pieces of the puzzle as to where chiropractic began.

Reaching two and a half millennia into the past, Western physicians and surgeons also practiced spinal manipulation. In the centuary or two before chiropractic was born, however, orthodx medical practitioners abandoned this form of manual therapy, leaving spinal manipulation to persist as a folk specialty of uneducated bonesetters.

For a time, only books and papers gathering dust on library shelves survived to document manipulative techniques considered quite orthodox from antiquity until the 17th centuary. Almost unnoticed, medical iconoclast continued even into the 19th centuary to practice or advocate spinal manipulation in Great Britain, but not in the United States.

In the 19th centuary, many hard working American rural and industrial communities suffered from back and neck pain, but almost nobody in the United States at that time was practicing spinal manipulation to give them relief. One family of English bonesetters migrated to New England and at least one individual bonesetter apparently ventured into the vast wilderness of frontier America.

Bonesetters were rare in the United States, however, and quite unavailable to most farmers and workers who needed spinal care. Daniel David Palmer helped to fill this vacuum when he created the chiropractic profession.