The Religion of Chiropractic

Let me begin by saying that, as a historian of modern yoga, I am highly sympathetic to Holly Folk’s assertion that chiropractic has too long been ignored by historians of medicine, thus being left to the partisan and hagiographic treatment of chiropractors (7). In The Religion of Chiropractic, Folk has given us a rich, carefully drawn out, and historically grounded account of chiropractic’s origin myth—the founding (or “discovery”) of the practice by D. D. Palmer and the family’s subsequent centrality to its development. Folk argues that the success of chiropractic depends on its “strategic placement” in a context where we are encouraged to “understand alternative medical theories as a form of cultural resistance to a rapidly centralizing medical establishment” (7). The book goes on convincingly to demonstrate the ways in which the persistence and lasting impact of chiropractic are owed to its ability to balance professionalization and institutional alterity as it emerged from a historical moment during which the rules of the game were still nascent as far as modern medicine is concerned. To frame her analysis, Folk relies on two tendencies that she identifies as central to chiropractic: vitalism and populism.

Aesthetics · Alternative medicine · Art · Chiropractic · Context (archaeology) · Political science · Politics · Populism · Resistance (ecology) · Sociology · Historical Psychiatry and Medical Practices · History · History of Medicine Studies · Law · Medical History and Innovations · Medicine