Daniel David Palmer was a Canadian nitwit who never seemed to have much luck with anything. Born in 1845, he emigrated to Iowa soon after reaching adulthood and involved himself in several failed ventures; including being a school teacher, beekeeper, and grocery store owner. However, none of these jobs really worked out, mostly because DD had the business acumen of a three day old ham sandwich. Like many such idiots of his day, DD often got himself involved into the various strange fads that sprung up at the time. The first of these was spiritualism, the belief that via mediums people are able to talk with the dead. However, this didn’t prove to be a very lucrative avenue for DD, since he wasn’t even talented enough to pull off the trickery of the spiritualists, so instead he got into magnetic healing, a quack form of alternative medicine which claimed that diseases could be cured by running magnetic fields over parts of the body. This was of course complete bullshit, but it didn’t stop health conscious idiots from paying out the nose for totally worthless treatments.
DD ran a magnetic healing clinic for nearly a decade, gaining a reputation around town as a charlatan taking advantage of the stupid. This might have been his entire career if not for a chance encounter with his office building’s janitor, a man who liked a good joke. After hearing a real zinger one day in 1896, DD gave the man a hearty slap on the back, a few days after which the janitor claimed his impaired hearing had improved. While most people would’ve just laughed politely at the janitor, DD instead utilized this experience to create his own quack theory that the body runs off magical energy flowing through its nervous system, and that the cause of all disease was the disruption of this energy via kinks in the spinal cord. Therefore the cure to all disease was realigning the spine. However, not finding the slapping a janitor origin story enticing enough, DD made up some spiritualist bullshit about some long dead doctor telling him how to cure people. So it was that DD became the first chiropractor.
Initially, DD kept his so-called chiropractic secrets to himself, but after a few years of idiots flocking to him, he decided the real money was to be made training others how to do it so he founded the Palmer School of Chiropractic. Amongst his earliest students was his son B.J. Palmer. DD and BJ did not really get along all that well, probably because DD was a rather distant father who mostly showed his love by hitting his children with leather straps. However, they did work together for several years, mostly denouncing vaccines as hogwash and considering whether or not to turn chiropratic into a religion, eventually deciding against it because they didn’t want to risk being confused with the various other weird cults popular at the time. Eventually in 1906, DD was arrested for practicing medicine without a license. By the time he got out, BJ had seized control of the college. Forcing his father to sign over ownership, he sent the old man packing.
DD traveled west after losing his college, founding several new chiropractic colleges, much to the chagrin of his son. They did not see each other again until 1913, when DD returned to Iowa and BJ hit him with his car. DD died a few weeks later of typhoid, but rumors quickly began circulating that BJ had killed him. For his part, BJ spent the next several decades promoting his father’s pseudo-science treatments and defending them from attacks by legitimate doctors and the American Medical Association (AMA). Thousands of chiropractors were imprisoned for illegally practicing medicine, which BJ combated via clever word play, such as stating that chiropractors analyzed patients rather than diagnosing them. He also began political campaigns to legalize chiropractic in all fifty states, began traveling the world to spread his ideas, and bought a radio station from which he espoused his nutty ideas and raved against vaccinations and water fluoridation. Though he feuded with his son, David Daniel Palmer, for a time over the younger man’s decision to go to business school, the two later made up, and when BJ died in 1961 the college was handed off to the new DD.
As for the ever growing mass of chiropractors, the AMA continued to pushback against them, even labeling the practice as an unscientific cult in 1966, advising its members that it was unethical to be in anyway associated with it. Despite this, Louisiana became the 50th state to legalize chiropractors in 1974. The battle with the AMA continued until 1987, when a federal judge ruled that such declarations violated the Sherman anti-trust act, because by god, this was America and Americans are allowed to believe whatever bullshit they please. This made it possible for chiropractic care to be covered by health insurance. Today, chiropractic is a $12.3 billion industry, with many practitioners also delving into other bullshit medical practices, such as shoving crystals in places where crystals really shouldn’t go. Despite absolutely zero scientific proof, the majority of practitioners still believe in DD’s original theories regarding magical nerve energy.