CHIROPRACTIC HERITAGE
 

One day in 1878, while working in a stooped, cramped position, Harvey Lillard felt something "pop" in his neck. A few days later his hearing was gone.

Seventeen years passed in silence. Then, on September 18, 1895, Harvey Lillard related his story to Daniel David Palmer, a magnetic healer who practiced in Davenport, Iowa, in the Ryan Building where Lillard was a janitor.

Palmer examined the janitor’s spine and discovered a bump in the area where Lillard said he had felt the pop. Reasoning that this bump was the result of one of the spinal column’s 26 vertebrae being out of line, Palmer persuaded Lillard to let him try to restore it to its normal position.

He applied a force to the bump. There was another pop, and the bump was gone. In a few days, Lillard’s hearing was restored. In the process, chiropractic was born.

Chiropractic is a relatively new health care profession - just over 100 years old. Although the profession is young, many of its vitalistic principles date back thousands of years. Ancient Egyptians and Greeks, while possessing little knowledge of the internal structure of the human body, were aware of the body’s continual striving to heal itself. During the Renaissance, men of learning put forth theories which spoke of “vital forces” within the body that organized its resistance to disease. The “vital force” they spoke of is what chiropractors refer to as the body’s innate intelligence.

It was Daniel David Palmer who, in 1895, discovered the relationship among the vital forces, the nerve system, the vertebrae and the expression of health. He reasoned that an innate intelligence continuously strives to maintain the body’s organization. He also realized that this innate intelligence utilizes the nerve system to assemble and transmit the information necessary to ensure the proper function of the various parts of the body.

Palmer further reasoned that a vertebra that was even slightly misaligned could cause pressure on the spinal cord or small spinal nerves. This misalignment and interference, called a vertebral subluxation, modifies the impulses carried by the nerves and this, in turn, modifies bodily function. In such a state, the body is less able to function, maintain its own health, and ultimately to express life.

After adjusting a subluxated vertebra for the first time, Palmer witnessed the restoration of spinal integrity, a dramatic change in his patient's health and the birth of a profession.

Chiropractic grew rapidly under the guidance of Palmer’s son, B.J., who transformed the profession into an advanced science and a well-developed art. His goal was to be able to objectively locate and analyze vertebral subluxation and to verify the changes that occurred both when vertebrae became subluxated and when the vertebral subluxation was corrected.

Today, chiropractic has evolved into a highly developed science and art which deals not with disease, but with vertebral subluxation and its effect on the body’s natural striving toward health. Chiropractic, as a primary health care profession, recognizes and respects the body’s innate striving to maintain its own health and has developed sophisticated techniques for correcting vertebral subluxation, a major interference to that striving. Chiropractic views health as more than the absence of disease. It is optimum life expression on every level.