Marketplace of the Marvelous (38 page)

Some chiropractors ignored the spiritual aspects of Palmer's theory altogether, applying his system to the nagging back troubles for which regular medicine had little to offer. This frustrated and angered Palmer, who saw his system as a way to alleviate the world's ills and illuminate life's mysteries, and not simply a method of relieving chronic back pain. Those who thought so, declared Palmer, were “unprincipled shysters” and “kleptomaniac scavengers.”
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But for people suffering
from lumbago and sciatica, the most common nineteenth-century back ailments, the mysteries of life took a backseat to the relief of debilitating pain.

People had searched for and tried various back remedies for centuries. For “An old Stubborn Pain in the Back,” John Wesley's eighteenth-century
Primitive Physick
suggested steeping the “root of Water-Fern in Water” and rubbing it over the affected area. Rheumatism, the old word for musculoskeletal pain, could be helped in a variety of ways, from wrapping the back in molasses-smeared bandages to living on fresh “Milk Whey” and white bread for fourteen days.
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Many regular doctors prescribed opium for the pain, taken as laudanum or morphine or mixed in powders or elixirs. They also bled and made shallow cuts in the skin to reduce inflammation in the part of the body in pain. In the late nineteenth century, electrical devices became popular pain relievers. Dr. Scott's Electric Flesh Brush was “
WARRANTED TO CURE
” a panoply of illnesses, from rheumatism and “Diseases of the Blood” to those “Back Aches peculiar to Ladies.” The brush produced an electromagnetic current through its bristles and came with a silver compass to test the potency of the charge.
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Electrical devices are still popular today. One, known as a TENS (transcutaneous electrical nerve stimulation) unit, stimulates the low back and other painful areas and is sometimes prescribed by regular doctors despite conflicting evidence of efficacy.
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As the range of these treatments suggests, no one had a clue how to relieve back ailments. That failure gave chiropractic an opportunity to fill a very real physical need. Palmer's disapproval did little to dissuade some chiropractors from focusing entirely on the technical rather than spiritual aspects of the system. A Dr. Metzger in Anaconda, Montana, even predicted that one day instead of asking others how they were, the daily greeting would be replaced with “How's your spine?” This focus helped chiropractic gain a devoted following.
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Part of the appeal of both osteopathy and chiropractic to many Americans was the simplicity of their theories. This was nothing new. Irregulars had long championed straightforward and accessible medicine. The idea of disease as an obstruction in need of correcting made intuitive sense to followers. But simplicity was also becoming increasingly anachronistic. Scientific discoveries in the late nineteenth century, most notably the germ theory of disease, convinced many medical researchers and regular doctors that disease could not be
explained by one universal cause, especially one that accounted for both the body and the spirit as Palmer and Still believed their systems did. Manual manipulation also struck many regulars as too crude to address the wonders and intricacies discovered in the lens of a microscope. The regular medical profession had a vested interest in complexity, though. Medicine had to be beyond the comprehension and skill of the general public to command respect and prestige. Simple explanations undermined the authority and expertise of doctors.
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Osteopaths did not ignore or stand defiant in the face of new scientific discoveries. By the early twentieth century, most accepted that germs caused disease, though they interpreted the finding through an osteopathic lens. The health of the body's structure determined the viability of germs in the body, reasoned osteopaths. Germs thrived where the blood pooled and slowed: at osteopathic lesions, in other words. Manipulation stimulated the body's natural resistance by restoring the free flow of blood, which would overcome the infection.
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How to combat and prevent infection became the determined preoccupation of regular doctors in the first decade of the twentieth century. They searched for effective, germ-killing drugs, an investigation that only heightened tensions among osteopaths over the admissibility of drugs into osteopathic education and daily practice.

Chiropractors, on the other hand, had a more complicated relationship with the germ theory. While most did not outright reject the existence of germs, chiropractors believed that regular medicine overemphasized germs—just like drugs and surgery—and that the true cause of disease was not outside, where germs lived, but inside the body. This idea left germs in a rather nebulous place in chiropractic theory. “Chiropractors have found in every disease that is supposed to be contagious,
a cause in the spine
,” wrote B. J. Palmer. “There is no contagious disease. . . . There is no infection. . . . There is a cause internal to man that makes of his body in a certain spot, more or less a breeding ground [for microbes].”
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Chiropractors did believe that hygiene was important to health, just as regular medicine had come to believe thanks to the hydropaths by the late nineteenth century, though chiropractors likely saw it as a way to promote overall health rather than as a means of controlling and containing the spread of germs and thus disease.
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Because they emphasized nature and viewed disease as an internal process, chiropractors also tended to reject medical devices and gadgets like electric massagers because the introduction of
these technologies suggested that nature was inadequate to the task of healing. Chiropractic ambivalence about the germ theory of disease continued well into the twentieth century, coming to a head in the 1940s with the introduction of antibiotics, which made germs harder to ignore. Although this led to a decline in chiropractic opposition, some chiropractors to this day do not accept that microbes can cause disease. The idea of disease caused and cured from inside or outside the body still constitutes a real philosophical difference between chiropractic and regular approaches to health care.
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While many Americans frequented chiropractors and osteopaths for philosophical reasons, many others went out of necessity; they were the only doctors in town. Since colonial times, regulars had been concentrated in more populous areas of the country, leaving rural and frontier communities to fend for themselves. By the early twentieth century, advances in medical science began dividing medical practice into subspecialties. Doctors no longer served as clinician and surgeon treating all diseases and all patients as they had for centuries. Many regulars moved to hospitals and medical institutions in urban areas to practice where the money and patient pool offered greater opportunities and benefits, often leaving rural communities without medical care. Both chiropractors and osteopaths benefited from this shift. They earned their first and most loyal followers in the rural Midwest and other small towns around the country, where they found a grateful clientele whose care absolutely depended on the survival of these systems. They also thrived in urban areas by offering a distinctive treatment that had no counterpart in regular medicine, creating a patient population dependent on their services.
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It certainly did not hurt that osteopathy and chiropractic tended to cost less than regular care as well.

Like most of the irregulars before them, osteopathy and chiropractic also legitimated all diseases as worthy of consideration and care, and they promised hope for all. Regular medicine often designated patients, particularly those suffering from chronic illnesses, as hopeless, or worse, as hypochondriacal. In osteopathy and chiropractic, nothing was impossible, nothing incurable. Each had a theory that provided a clear and coherent explanation for a range of sometimes confusing and conflicting symptoms that comforted patients in search of answers.
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And they did report great success in their treatments. Like those using hydropathy, most osteopathic and chiropractic patients were not generally acutely ill but suffered from chronic problems. These patients could generally get around, albeit painfully at times, and practitioners reported positive results with many patients who had given up on ever feeling better.

Regular medicine had plenty of biting criticism and ridicule for these new systems of manual medicine. Mark Twain rather precisely summed up the situation when he declared that asking a doctor what he thought about osteopathy was like “going to Satan to find out about the Christian religion.”
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Regulars disparaged not only the quality of osteopathic schools but also what they saw as its graduates' blind subservience to a poorly educated, hopelessly vague, and mystical leader. Osteopaths were guilty of “claiming impossible things and doing harmful ones.” Any good that resulted from osteopathy was simply luck or the power of suggestion. “Happy is the charlatan who happens to be at hand when the triumph of the recuperative power takes place, and thrice happy is he when a reputable man who knows nothing about such things can be persuaded that mere coincidence is the brilliant demonstration of a new art of healing,” proclaimed a 1905
New York Times
editorial.
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Regular physician Richard Newton declared osteopathy “a complete system of charlatanism, empiricism and quackery calculated and designed to impose on the credulous, superstitious and ignorant, and fraught with danger.”
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Most Americans were at least willing to give osteopathy a chance, and the system received mostly favorable reviews in popular magazines and newspapers. In 1895, John R. Musick wrote a history of osteopathy for
Godey's Magazine
that included a record of its successes. He condemned regulars for dismissing it out of hand and suggested that they did so out of fear of new ideas. Still's theory “has certainly achieved much success in the past, and is worthy of careful investigation before it is condemned,” Musick concluded.
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Among osteopathy's most prominent supporters was Mark Twain, who after humorous run-ins and experiments with several other irregular health systems seemed to have found the system he'd been looking for and became an outspoken advocate of Still. Twain even testified at a hearing before the New York Assembly Committee on Public Health in 1901 in favor of a bill to license osteopaths. In trademark Twain
fashion, he kept the room laughing with a speech that blended a plea for personal liberty with self-deprecation. “Now I am always wanting to try everything that comes along. It doesn't matter much what it is, I want to try it. And so I went to [osteopath] Mr. Kelgrin, was treated by him in London, and later on in Switzerland, and he did me a lot of good,” said Twain, “although I must admit that my education doesn't qualify me to say just when I am in good health. But I should like to have the right to experiment with my own body to my heart's content. I don't care whether it is to my own peril or anybody else's.”
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Osteopathy also counted President Theodore Roosevelt, General Dwight Eisenhower, and businessman Howard Hughes among its supporters.
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Chiropractors mostly eluded the attention of regulars, at least at first. Perhaps they were too focused on osteopathy. But by the early twentieth century, reports of patient deaths due to “neck twisting,” vertebral “dislocations,” and other disfigurements were a regular feature in regular medical journals. B. J. Palmer's pretensions and showmanship captivated followers and became fodder for critics. “Chiropractic is a religion, it is the worship of B. J. Palmer,” wrote Charles Warner. “Palmer encourages the idea by wearing his hair and beard to resemble Christ; and by having his pictures taken in a pose to imitate Christ in the painting ‘Christ Before Pilate.'”
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Regulars also delighted in sending barely literate letters requesting admission to chiropractic schools and publishing the results. In 1923, the
Journal of the American Medical Association
reprinted a letter supposedly from a young Texas widow seeking to enroll at the Carver Chiropractic College in Oklahoma City. “Sirs, Mister Kirpatic School, I want to rite letter an see if I can be kirpatic dr. if you can make a kirpatic dr. for how much money I got about 2 thousend dolers that my husband got wen he died.” The Carver school responded with condolences to the widow and commended her interest in chiropractic. They offered her immediate admission and praised her decision to spend her money on “a real life's work.”
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Perhaps the most famous condemnation of chiropractic, though, came from Morris Fishbein, editor of the
Journal of the American Medical Association
and well known for his quack-busting crusades. Though no friend to osteopathy, Fishbein saw chiropractors as far worse, a “malignant tumor on the body of osteopathy. . . . Osteopathy is essentially a method of entering the practice of medicine by the back door. Chiropractic, by contrast, is an
attempt to arrive through the cellar. The man who applies at the backdoor at least makes himself presentable. The one who comes through the cellar is besmirched with dust and grime: he carries a crowbar and he may wear a mask.”
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As much as regulars disparaged chiropractors, though, osteopaths might have hated them even more. They were certain that Palmer had simply copied Still's ideas and methods. Rumors of Palmer having visited Still in Kirksville proliferated. As proof, osteopaths pointed to Palmer's signature in Still's guestbook. Palmer denied ever being in Kirksville and claimed the signature was a fraud.
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While many Americans found much to like in chiropractic, it struggled to receive praise in the press. Many magazines and newspapers took an extremely negative view toward chiropractors and their philosophy, sounding every bit like regular doctors. In
Harper's Weekly
in 1915, journalist George Creel recalled visiting a chiropractor with a made-up problem needing treatment. The chiropractor cracked and popped Creel's neck and spine to the point that Creel felt “he had done his worst.” Creel was wrong, though. “He turned me over on my face again, and in a few seconds I felt an awful pressure on my spine, first one spot, then another,” described Creel. When Creel got home, he looked at his back in the mirror and saw “a large black spot the size of a grape fruit. Only heaven knows what would have been my present state had I not been in perfect health and strength when I took the treatment.”
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These types of stories often appeared in newspapers that also featured ads for chiropractors promising free consultations or “no cure, no pay” policies as a measure of good faith. Some chiropractors boldly asked for patients who seemed incurable. A Dr. Offerman in St. Paul, Minnesota, advertised, “When others fail come to me . . . don't give up. I will guarantee a cure. Remember that curing disease after all others have failed is my specialty.”
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