Daniel David Palmer March 7, β October 20, was a Canadian-born American spiritualist and activist best known for creating chiropractic.
Palmer opposed anything he thought to be associated with mainstream medicine such as vaccination. Palmer believed that the human body had an ample supply of natural healing power transmitted through the nervous system.
He suggested that if any one organ was affected by an illness, it merely must not be receiving its normal "nerve supply" which he dubbed a "spinal misalignment", or subluxation. He saw chiropractic as a form of realigning to reestablish the supply.
At age twenty he moved to the United States with his family. Palmer held various jobs such as a beekeeper, school teacher, and grocery store owner, and had an interest in the various health philosophies of his day, including magnetic healing and spiritualism. In , Palmer was probably a student of metaphysics. In , Palmer was practicing magnetic healing from an office in Davenport when he encountered the building's janitor, Harvey Lillard.
Lillard's hearing was severely impaired, and Palmer theorized that a palpable lump in his back that Palmer had noticed was related to Lillard's hearing deficits. This account of how the first adjustment came to be would later be countered by Lillard's daughter who recounts a different interaction between the two men, as told to her by her father.
