Daniel David Palmer

Daniel David Palmer (March 7, 1845 – October 20, 1913) was born in Canada West and later moved to the United States, where he became a spiritualist and activist. He is most famous for founding chiropractic.

Founding of chiropractic

Palmer also strongly supported magnetic healing, a form of alternative medicine considered pseudoscientific, and he rejected mainstream medical practices like vaccination. He believed the human body could heal itself through the nervous system, and that illness in any organ was due to a lack of normal "nerve supply" caused by what he called a "spinal misalignment" or subluxation. For Palmer, chiropractic was a method of realigning the spine to restore that supply.

Early life

Palmer grew up in the hamlet of Brown's Corners (later Audley) in Pickering Township, now part of Ajax, Ontario. His parents were Thomas Palmer and Katherine McVay, and his great-great-grandparents came from the United States. He attended Audley School until age 11 and was later raised in Port Perry. At 20, he moved to the United States with his family.

Over the years, he worked as a beekeeper, schoolteacher, and grocery store owner, and he took an interest in health philosophies of the time, including magnetic healing and spiritualism. By 1870, he was likely studying metaphysics. He began practicing magnetic healing in the mid-1880s in Burlington and Davenport, Iowa.

Magnetic healer

The founding of chiropractic came in 1895, when Palmer was working as a magnetic healer in Davenport. The building’s janitor, Harvey Lillard, had a severe hearing impairment.

Palmer noticed a lump on Lillard’s back and suggested it might be connected. He manipulated Lillard’s back and later claimed the man’s hearing was restored—a key story in chiropractic history. However, Lillard’s daughter recalled a different version: Palmer overheard her father telling a joke, slapped him on the back after the punchline, and Lillard mentioned his hearing improved days later, inspiring Palmer to explore spinal manipulation as a cure.

In 1896, Palmer’s early descriptions of chiropractic philosophy closely resembled Andrew Taylor Still’s osteopathy, established a decade earlier. Both viewed the body as a "machine" that could be manipulated for drugless healing. Both used spinal manipulation to treat joint problems and improve health. Chiropractors called the manipulable issue a "vertebral subluxation," claiming it interfered with the nervous system; osteopaths called it "somatic dysfunction," believing it affected circulation.

Palmer distinguished his method by using short-lever techniques on the spinous and transverse processes. Osteopaths soon campaigned against chiropractic as a bastardized version of their field and sought licensure to separate the two. Although Palmer initially denied training under osteopathy founder A. T. Still, in 1899 he wrote that he had taken a costly course in osteopathy, which gave him confidence, and stated, "Chiropractic is osteopathy gone to seed." His theory held that altered nerve flow caused all disease, with misaligned vertebrae disrupting that flow. He claimed that a subluxated vertebra was the cause of 95 percent of all diseases, with the remaining 5 percent from other displaced joints.

Spread of chiropractic

Palmer began teaching his methods. In 1897, he founded the Palmer School and Cure in Davenport, later renamed Palmer College of Chiropractic. His early students included his son, B.J. Palmer.

In 1906, Iowa prosecuted Palmer under a new medical arts law for practicing medicine without a license. He chose jail over paying the fine, spending 17 days incarcerated before paying it. Soon after, he sold the school to his son and moved to the western United States, where he helped establish chiropractic schools in Oklahoma, California, and Oregon.

As an active spiritualist, Palmer said he "received chiropractic from the other world" from a deceased physician named Dr. Jim Atkinson. His son B.J. Palmer noted that his father often attended the Mississippi Valley Spiritualists Camp Meeting, where he first claimed to receive messages from Dr. Atkinson on chiropractic principles. Palmer wrote that the knowledge and philosophy given by this spiritual being appealed to his reason, and that he obtained explanations of physical phenomena from an intelligence in the spiritual realm.