The year was 1895, the same year that x-rays were discovered.   At that time, Health Care was provided by a diversity of unregulated and unlicensed professions, including osteopaths, magnetic healers and “medical” doctors.   In those days, most medical education consisted of working as an “apprentice” for a medical doctor, and learning the craft by observation.

D.D. Palmer, the Father of Chiropractic, was a magnetic healer, with a huge practice in Davenport, Iowa.   He had doubts about the “germ theory” as the complete explanation of the cause of all disease.   After all, if germs could kill...shouldn't we all be dead?   He asked “how it was that 2 brothers could work in the same shop, eat the same food, sleep in the same bed, and that one would succumb to a disease while the other one would not”?

His belief was that it was not just the “seed” (or germ) which was the cause.   He felt that the "soil", or the bodies own recuperative power (which he later labelled the “innate intelligence”, and we now call homeostasis) was the missing part of the equation, which defined the continuum between health and “dis-ease”.

One day D.D. was talking with Harvey Lillard, the man who owned the janitor service in his building.   Harvey was deaf.   He mentioned to D.D. that years before, while lifting a heavy weight, he felt something “snap” at the base of his neck.   It was several weeks later that his hearing started to fade.

D.D. was intrigued, and asked Harvey if he could examine his back.   What he “felt” (and we now call this “palpation”) was that one of the upper thoracic bones was sticking out much more than the one above or below it.   He explained to Harvey that he felt that this “bone out of place” could be causing pressure on his spinal cord, and that this could be the reason that Harvey was now deaf.   He convinced him to lie down on the couch, and placed his hands on the transverse processes of the bone and, as D.D. explained, “wracked it back into position”.   When Harvey got up, he stated that he could hear a horse drawn cart down in the street!   This was the first thing he had heard in 17 years!

What an auspicious way for a profession to be born!   Our “no drugs, no surgery” approach has remained true to D.D.'s plilosophy of the “seed and the soil”.   What a chiropractor accomplishes with the adjustment of the spine, is to remove the impediment to the brain's control of the body.   We call that impediment, which impinges the nerves a “ subluxation”.