The word Osteopathy was coined by a medical doctor Dr. Andrew Taylor Still in about 1874 however the history of this treatment approach dates back thousands of years. Chinese writing dating back 2,700 BC refer to manipulation of muscles and the spine as a healing art. Hippocrates in the fifth century BC and Galen (131-202), both practiced and wrote about it. Similar procedures were used in ancient Egypt, Babylon, Syria, Tibet, and by the Aztecs and Incas in Central and South America.

 

During the Middle Ages practice of manipulation became known as bone setting performed mainly by medical doctors. The early 19th century saw a rise in patent medicine. It is well to remember that the first drug to be manufactured was aspirin in 1899 by Bayer. Prior to that medical doctors had a more diverse role than today, dispensing herbal remedies and plant drugs such as foxglove (1785) and morphine (1803), mineral drugs including large doses of heavy metals, as well as tending cuts and abrasions, stitching wounds, setting broken bones and performing bone setting.

 

In Hollywood Westerns doctors are often referred to “sore bones”.  Although some remedies were sold by doctors of medicine, most were sold by lay people with little or no warnings, and often with questionable claims. The addictive sometimes toxic effects of some remedies especially morphine and mercury-based cures lead to the rise of less dangerous alternatives such as homeopathy, eclectic medicine, Thomsonian Physiomedicalism and of course osteopathic and chiropractic medicine. In the mid-19th century as Charles Darwin published “the Origin of Species” and Louis Pasteur’s germ theory began to replace the metaphysical causes of disease, the search for invisible microbes required the world to embrace scientific method as a way to discover the causes of disease. This was a period of great change, of discovery and enlightenment.

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In settling America, it is not surprising that the rough and tumble injuries that the early settlers encountered required hands on remedies.  Following the American Civil War licencing of health care all but vanished, new medical schools flourished. Paget (1866) describes inconsistency among bone setters in his lecture “Cases that Bone Setters Cure”. The first attempt to describe bone setter’s manipulation systematically was Hood, a medical doctor in his lecture “On Bone Setting” 1871.

 

Uniformity was needed and unhappy with the way that other doctors prescribed medicines of the day such as mercury and lead to excess an American physician Dr. Andrew Taylor Still sought a more holistic approach and in 1874 established a system of manipulative treatment which he called Osteopathy. Dr. Still believed that the conventional medical system lacked credible efficiency and treated the effects rather than causes of disease, commonly with medicines of the day, such as arsenic, castor oil, whisky, opium and large doses of toxic heavy metals such as lead and mercury. These heroic doses and unsanitary surgical procedures caused more deaths than cures.

 

Dr. Still had studied machines in his earlier life and he considered that the muscles and bones of the body worked together like a machine. He rejected the idea that germs alone cause disease, rather that diseases were more common when bones moved out of place and disrupted the flow of blood and the flow of nervous impulses, making the body more susceptible to disease. He, therefore concluded, that by manipulating to restore the interrupted flow, the body could better cure its own disease. In 1892 Dr. Still founded the first Osteopathic college in Kirksville, Missouri.

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In 1886 Daniel David Palmer a teacher, grocer, and magnetic healer opened his office of magnetic healing curing people with magnetic hands.  Accounts differ as to how D.D. Palmer started manipulating. Palmer himself claims that in 1895 a partially deaf janitor Harvey Lillard was working in his office with his shirt off and noticed a lump on Lillard’s back and applied pressure to it which restored Lillard’s hearing. Lillard’s daughter Vadeenia Lillard Simons said that her father was telling a joke outside Palmer’s office, at the punch-line Palmer slapped Lillard on the back with a book that he was carrying and that the next day Lillard noticed that his hearing had improved. 

 

Initially, Palmer denied being trained by Osteopathic medicine founder Dr. A.T. Still, however, in 1899 he admitted that some years earlier he studied Osteopathy.  D.D. Palmer’s first description and underlying philosophy of Chiropractic is strikingly similar to Andrew Still’s principles of Osteopathy described two decades earlier. Both described the body as a “machine” whose parts could be manipulated to produce a drug-less cure. Both professed the use of spinal manipulation on joint dysfunction to improve health.

 

Palmer called this lesion a subluxation which caused nerve impingement and, consistent with his magnetic healing philosophy, took a laying on of the hand’s approach manipulating the spine without first releasing the muscles. In contrast, Dr. Still considered any lesion also involved tight muscles as an integral cause of skeletal dysfunction.  This, in turn, affected the nervous system and accordingly incorporated muscle release techniques as prerequisites to manipulation, as both were a part of one system. Nevertheless, Palmer started to experiment with manipulation to which he coined the word Chiropractic and added manipulation to his teachings.

 

In 1896 more than twenty years after Dr. Andrew Still described Osteopathy D.D. Palmer opened Palmer School of Chiropractic in Davenport, Iowa only teaching spinal manipulation. D.D. Palmer’s son B.J. Palmer assumed control of Palmer School in 1906 and seriously considered declaring Chiropractic a religion as many Chiropractic leaders at the time invoked religious imagery but he decided against it. B.J. Palmer quoted “….chiropractic was founded on a business, not a professional basis. We manufacture chiropractors. We teach them the idea then we show them how to sell it”. Chiropractors of the time took a very evangelical approach in sharp contrast to science-based Osteopathy.

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