By Chris Dalrymple, D.C., F.I.C.C
While many people are aware that chiropractors have been fighting uphill battles with mainstream medicine, most are unaware that this often meant going to jail on behalf of the profession. In 1909 the Carnegie Foundation commissioned Abraham Flexner to visit medical schools and write a report on the status of medical education in the United States and Canada. The report found that many of the schools were substandard. It stressed the need to link medical schools with universities and heavily emphasized the need for scientific research. The Rockefeller Foundation funded grants for the implementation of the study’s recommendations. With the Flexner Report in hand medical education reform was in full swing giving birth to the strongest professional monopoly in the United States: organized medicine.
With the creation of such a strong monopoly, there was no effective opposition to the implementation of the reforms recommended in the Flexner Report. Consequently, not only was organized medicine able to “clean up” and improve their own schools, they were also able to shut down their competition by closing schools of the other healing arts — which included chiropractic schools. Of course this was all done in the name of “public safety.”
Given the power that organized medicine had garnered, they held the cards for governing all health professions. It should come as no surprise that they strenuously fought every effort by chiropractors to obtain licensure. Consequently, chiropractic in most states was considered practicing medicine without a license — a crime punishable by fine or imprisonment.
It certainly goes without saying that practicing chiropractors of this era were a special breed. Not only did these chiropractors have to firmly believe that what they were doing was important enough to technically put themselves in conflict with the law, but they had to be willing to accept the consequences when the police showed up at the office door. While most simply paid their fines and were back in the office seeing patients later in the afternoon, many instead chose to stand up for their belief in their profession.
This chiropractic martyrdom captured the hearts of the press and the public at large. Crowds of up to 1,200 people were said to have gathered to voice their outrage at the senselessness of these arrests. Over 100,000 pieces of mail poured into one prison regarding the arrest of a husband and wife chiropractic team who were forced to say goodbye to their twin 3-year-old girls at the jail door for their 100-day sentence. Ironically, most of the incarcerated chiropractors opened up “practices” right there in their jail cells — continuing to commit the very crime they were locked up for in the first place. These chiropractors were not only treating their fellow prison mates, but the guards as well. Some even went on to make political statements by adjusting their regular patients from the jails.
Over the next 50 years all other states were able to achieve licensure for chiropractic in one way or another. Louisiana, in 1974, was the last state to license chiropractors. Today, even though chiropractors enjoy licensure in all 50 states, not all parts of the world can say the same. Arrest and jailing of chiropractors for “practicing medicine without a license” continues in various countries. History has shown, however, that chiropractors will not be stopped.
