Folk, H. (2006). [Abstract] Vertebral Vitalism: American Metaphysics and Birth of Chiropractic. Ph.D. Dissertation. Indiana University. (Copyrighted all rights reserved. Posted with permission of the author.)

Vertebral Vitalism: American Metaphysics and the Birth of Chiropractic

    My dissertation contributes to the study of alternative religion and medicine by examining the early history of chiropractic. I show how themes in the chiropractic story have resonated across a wide range of American popular healing and spiritual movements. My work focuses on the lives and thought of Daniel David Palmer and his son Joshua Bartlett Palmer.
    My dissertation links chiropractic to the development of a distinct physiology that had broad public support through much of the nineteenth century. Health ideology was one manifestation of a greater popular intellectual culture, which can be traced to both Jacksonian populism and the market revolution. Popular intellectualism developed from the expansion of the production of knowledge through the print revolution. It stressed autodidacticism and subjective epistemology. Popular intellectualism carried a set of metaphysical ideas that informed both American spiritual and scientific understandings. These ideas, which derived from eighteenth-century and older European vitalism, created a common logic for popular conceptions about physiology that recurred in the theories of many irregular medical systems.  
    In the early twentieth century, the Palmers drew on this knowledge to create chiropractic. The Palmers were creative, independent thinkers who saw themselves as greatly at odds with their society. The individualism that rendered the Palmers so effective as popular medical innovators made them ill equipped for collaboration. Both D.D. Palmer and B.J. Palmer lost positions of influence in the chiropractic movement.
    Today, chiropractic is the most successful form of alternative medicine in America. Despite widespread acknowledgment that it has become part of "mainstream" healthcare, however, chiropractic continues to reflect many of the impulses associated with its early history.

Holly Folk
Assistant Professor
Liberal Studies, MS 9064
Western Washington University
516 High Street
Bellingham, WA 98225-9064
360.650.4866
Holly.Folk@wwu.edu

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