Business, Dull for 20,000

The chiropractors who, as the American Bureau of Chiropractic, met in Manhattan last week, saw no fun in the pun and joke played on them by the new Encyclopedia Britannica. Explained therein in immediate sequence are Chiromancy (Palmistry), Chiron (centaur wise in healing), Chiropodist, Chiropractic, Chiroptera (Bats). In chronicling Chiropractic the Encyclopedia commits one of its numerous errors. It pronounces B. J. Palmer the chief founder of the movement. The late Daniel David Palmer laid the foundations of chiropractic (1895). Bartholomew Josiah Palmer, his son, founded the Palmer School of Chiropractic (1903).

Bartholomew Josiah ("B. J.") Palmer attended last week's meeting. He is a middle-aged man with a scraggy mustache and Vandyke beard. His long, pomaded hair he kept away from his white shirt collar by looping a rubber band about it. His wife, Mabel Palmer, accompanied him.

He appreciated that all his audience knew what chiropractic is--"a system of adjustment consisting of palpitation of the spinal column to ascertain vertebral subluxations, followed by the adjustment of them by hand, in order to relieve pressure upon nerves at the intervertebra1. foramina so that nerve force may flow freely from the brain to the rest of the body"--more simply, manipulating the spinal column to relieve pressure on the nerves which pass through it.

He took for granted that all knew how his father started the movement. Daniel David Palmer was a "magnetic healer" who "cured" by laying his hands on innocents. One day a deaf Negro janitor came to him. The deafness had developed when "something broke in his back." Healer Palmer found a protuberance on the Negro's spinal column. He placed the man prone on the floor and knuckled the spine. After the "adjustment" the Negro could again hear, whence a new therapeutic art.

Hence Bartholomew Josiah Palmer restricted himself last week to advising his colleagues, colloquially, on how to boost their business, which seems generally in a poor way. One way was to use a diagnostic machine, a "neurocalometer," which he helped to invent. The chiropractor is to apply this apparatus to his patient's spine. It is supposed to indicate how poorly "nerve impulses" are flowing and thus to indicate where the chiropractor should lay his hands. Exhorted Dr. Palmer, characteristically: "You want to step up your results. I know you do, and it's only right you should, and I am now making it possible to help you. Now I have 50 neuro-calometers up in my room, and Mabel is up there and is perfectly willing to take away from you--so long as those neuro-calometers last--150 simoleons [dollars] each, so that you can take those neuro-calometers home and begin to build up your business."

Another illuminating, chiropractic advice: "How are you to charge what the case ought to pay? It's a question of salesmanship. But the trouble with you fellows is you're trying to tell your patients something and expecting your patient to believe something you don't believe yourself. The result is that your patient knows you're lying to him. Now I look them in the eye. And they know I know that I know that I know that I am not kidding them and they're not kidding themselves and they're not kidding me. And they're perfectly willing to lay down the big money. The difference between us is that you go about it in a sneaking way."

Thus strangely naiive and careless of utterance were the chiropractors,* who, despite their 20,000 practitioners and legal permission to work in 36 states and the District of Columbia,* are confessedly degenerating before the hard onslaught of the American Medical Association. They permitted Mrs. Palmer, the Mabel of Mr. Palmer's speech, to tell an anecdote of a woman friend who, all panting and excited, came wailing to her: "Oh, my dear, I have had such a harrowing experience. I was dining with a very dear friend. After we got up she said, 'Oh, I feel sick. It's my stomach.' She fell on the floor. I did not know what to do. There was nobody to call. The only thing I could think of was to punch her where the chiropractor punches me. I've had stomach trouble for years, you know. Well, I punched her and punched her, and, my dear, she died in my arms."

The present evil times for chiropractors they blame vaguely on Dr. Palmer. But Dr. William H. Werner of New York City, slickly barbered president of the American Bureau of Chiropractic and hence technical head of the profession, went to his defense, venomously: "It's all wrong for you to go on cursing and damning and abusing B. J. It is not right folks. He is human. He has his little weaknesses, as who among us has not? He has his faults. But let us not go on cursing, abusing, and damning him. ... I tell you, friends, it gave me a heartache to see those great [school] buildings [at Davenport] nearly empty and that great school [of chiropractic] almost without pupils. It wrung my heart to the uttermost."

His admission pleased Dr. Morris Fishbein who has been managing the American Medical Association's long and harsh fight against chiropractors and irregular practitioners of medicine. Dr. Fishbein recently prophesied that chiropractic would perish within two years.

To keep his profession from extinction, to get his fellow practitioners out of jail, President Werner exhorted his colleagues to give their Bureau $25 each a week for an indefinite period: "Are we so yellow that we are going to let ourselves quietly die off while the medical profession mangles millions of our fellow beings?" For such defense the chiropractors last week contributed exactly nothing.*

At San Antonio, last week, Dr. James R. Brain, president of the Texas Chiropractic College there, ejected two policemen from his building. They stood on the sidewalk and would not let him go outdoors, because he would not submit to smallpox vaccination ordered by Dr. William A. King, city health director.

*The significance of this blatant commercialism only Reporter Alva Johnston of the New York Herald Tribune discerned. Other reporters contented themselves with chiropractic publicity "handouts." Commendably intelligent, he made stenographic notes of the speeches.

*In the remaining states they practice precariously without license.

*Dr. Werner himself was prosecuted and threatened with jail some time ago. His patients banded together, contributed money for his defense, organized the American Bureau of Chiropractic. Dr. C. P. Eifertsen, bureau vice president, is now serving a three-months sentence at the Richmond County Jail for practicing medicine without a license. Chiropractic "straights" belong to the Bureau. It excludes "mixers." "Mixers" are those practitioners who mix hocus pocus with chiropractic.

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