Some time ago a chiropractor-anthropologist who presently works as a chiropractor told me that when growing up with her father, a chiropractor, in her Seventh-day Adventist household, the main topics of conversation around the dinner table were religion and chiropractic. Bearing this thought in mind and as an anthropologist who has visited a few chiropractic schools in the US and the Anglo-European College of Chiropractic in the UK, Holly Folk’s The Religion of Chiropractic struck a chord with me in a number of ways, both in terms of my personal encounters with the world of chiropractic and when writing about it. First of all, the book, which is very well written and organised, raises an intriguing dimension of particularly American chiropractic that has been touched upon in various books and articles but has never elaborated upon in the way that Folk, a religious studies scholar, does in her account. Even though chiropractic emerged in the American Midwest and, apparently, as Folk acknowledges, drew upon osteopathy, which was an earlier manual medical system developed by Andrew Taylor Still, a disenchanted regular physician, both systems drew upon an idea popular in the late nineteenth century, namely, that the spine is the key to good health. Like other alternative medical systems, including naturopathy, chiropractic drew upon vitalism and populism. D.D. Palmer, the ‘Discoverer of Chiropractic’, identified Innate Intelligence as the primary source of health and drew upon magnetic healing, touch therapy, spiritualism and American metaphysics in general. He referred to ‘Chiropractic Relgio’ and penned an essay titled ‘The Moral and Religious Duty of the Chiropractor’.
His flamboyant and entrepreneurial son, B.J., self-designated himself the ‘Developer of Chiropractic’, in large part because he turned the Palmer School of Chiropractic (PSC) into an chiropractic empire. This was by no means an uncontested one as numerous rivals within chiropractic, including those who drew upon other alternative medical systems, particularly, for a while, naturopathy, emerged. Thus began the proverbial divide between the ‘straights’ and the ‘mixers’ within chiropractic, with variations thereof, including the ‘super straights’ that continue to function as the most metaphysical of all the chiropractic strains. Indeed, John F.A., a former Mormon missionary and a PSC student, established the National College of Chiropractic in Davenport in 1905, which he later moved to Lombard, Illinois, and this was probably the leading mixer college.
While B.J. occasionally attended a Methodist church, like his father, he distained organised religion and gravitated toward New Thought, describing God as the ‘Big Fellow Inside’ who transmits benevolent power in a way similar to a radio station. Both D.D. and B.J. relied heavily upon print culture, and B.J. also relied on the radio, to propagate their beliefs about health and spirituality.
Ironically, while neither D.D. nor B.J. were fundamentalist Christians, the alternative medical system they founded and developed emerged in the Bible Belt, and many of their patients apparently were orthodox Christians. Indeed, the Intervarsity Christian Fellowship at PSC established the Christian Chiropractors Association in 1963, an organisation that continues to thrive, at least, in the US.
In the final chapter, titled ‘The world of chiropractic’, Folk briefly chronicles the development of chiropractic in Canada and Great Britain and to a lesser degree in Europe, although, for the most part, she does not elaborate upon her contention that chiropractic constitutes a religious system in these other settings. However, she discusses the involvement of some chiropractors in Rosicrucianism, at least, in the US. Conversely, Folk asserts that Rosicrucianism constitutes ‘in some ways chiropractic’s “alter” – a system that, unlike chiropractic and osteopathy intentionally cultivated the spiritual elements of vitalism’ (p. 277).
As an anthropologist who has not only examined chiropractic, as well as osteopathy and naturopathy, in the US but also the UK and Australia, Folk’s book poses for me the question of to what extent does a ‘religion of chiropractic’ exist outside of the US. This is a topic worthy of further research. Despite its dispersal to many countries, chiropractic is not a monolithic alternative medical system anywhere, including the US. In some instances it has become both biomedicalised and secularised, as I suspect it has in the UK, Europe, Australia, and New Zealand. In contrast to the US and Canada where chiropractic is only taught in private institutions, in Australia it is taught in three public universities. Ultimately, any medical system, whether it is biomedicine or an alternative medical system, is shaped by the larger sociocultural system in which it is embedded. Given that the US is a highly religiously oriented society, as Folk so effectively argues, it should be no surprise that at least there a ‘religion of chiropractic’ exists.
