Chiropractic Founder’s Day

Daniel David Palmer was born in Pickering, Ontario. He moved to the United States in 1865 and took up magnetic healing in Davenport, Iowa around 1880. In 1895 he performed the first chiropractic treatment on Harvey Lillard, an African American janitor with impaired hearing, by adjusting the misalignment in his spine. Lillard’s hearing was restored.

D.D. Palmer developed the theory that the misalignment of the spine was an underlying cause of all “dis-ease”. He developed a new discipline called Chiropractic and opened the Palmer School of Chiropractic in Davenport, Iowa, in order to teach his Chiropractic techniques to others. He was imprisoned in 1906 for practicing medicine without a license under Iowa’s medical arts law. He chose to serve a jail sentence instead of paying a fine as a form of protest against the state’s refusal to recognize chiropractic as a distinct profession.

After his incarceration, he passed on the school to his son B.J. Palmer in 1906, and moved west to open new chiropractic schools in Oklahoma, California, and Oregon.