The Religion of Chiropractic: Populist Healing from the American Heartland by Holly Folk

Author:Holly Folk [Folk, Holly]
Language: eng
Format: azw3
Publisher: The University of North Carolina Press
Published: 2017-03-13T04:00:00+00:00

I think Still may have taken the term “Biogen” from the work of Elliott Coues, who broke away from Helena Blavatsky. Coues offered this definition in 1884: “Biogen itself, of course, is alive; it is life; and biogen may be defined as spirit in combination with the minimum of matter necessary to its manifestation. Biogen is simply soul-stuff, as contradistinguished from ordinary matter; it is the substance which composes that thing which a well-known and very frequently quoted writer calls the ‘spiritual body.’ ”74 Though it is impossible to establish that Still was influenced by Coues’s work, there are striking similarities in their language and ideas. At the very least, this should inspire more research on the therapeutic dimensions of Theosophy, which have not received much scholarly attention.75

A. T. Still and D. D. Palmer were each writing from a vantage point of “displacement.” Viewed synoptically, their life stories suggest that the radical spiritualization of irregular medicine was accomplished both through the formulation of healing systems and in individual lives. The trajectory of their ideas show this transition at a deeply human level.

In the 1950s, Cyrus Lerner maintained that “Chiropractic Philosophy” was invented to put chiropractic on a religious footing, for the sole purpose of evading medical regulation.76 Lerner dismissed Innate Intelligence as D. D. Palmer’s “plank for erecting a religion.” Since then, the thesis that the Palmers’ Metaphysical chiropractic was largely strategic has remained attractive. It comports with other historians’ findings about alternative healing, especially those of Rennie Schoepflin, who has shown how Mary Baker Eddy developed the church-like elements of Christian Science after she and her trainees encountered too many difficulties operating as proprietary “spiritual healing practitioners.”77

“Chiropractic Religio” was invoked as a defense in at least one court case. Heinrich Dueringer, a Palmer graduate practicing in Manhattan was arrested in 1911 in a “sting” conducted by the New York County Medical Society. During the trial the following September, the defense showed D. D.’s article “The Moral and Religious Duty of a Chiropractor” as evidence for the “church of Chiropractic.”78 The court, however, was skeptical, as was the author of the New York Times story about Dueringer’s trial. The unnamed journalist raised an important point: most Americans were uncomfortable with the idea that one could do spiritual “work” on a “for-hire” basis. This may be one of the reasons “Chiropractic Religio” never took off. In addition, it may speak to a “natural cap” on the growth of systems like Christian Science or Mind Cure, in which healing services are proprietary.

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