2015 TCA Centennial Powerpoint

This presentation was prepared and presented for the TCA Centennial program.  Brief captioning has been added between the slides.

1800-1900

Executive Summary:

•  “The practice of medicine was deregulated during the first half of the 1800s.”  This period saw the growth of new schools of thought about how to practice medicine.

• States began to repeal medical licensing laws, and by 1849, only New Jersey and the District of Columbia had anything close to a medical practice law.

• In 1837, the Medical Practice Act of Texas was written by Dr. Anson Jones, one of the few formally trained physicians in Texas at that time.  He was also a congressman and the last president of the Republic of Texas. 

• December 14, 1837, The Congress of the Republic of Texas then created the Board of Medical Censors for the purposes of granting licenses to practice medicine and surgery in the Republic.  

• March 7, 1845, D. D. Palmer was born in what is now Ontario, Canada.

• 1847:  “Recognizing that the problems in both medical training and the practice of medicine were damaging their professional status, physicians practicing traditional medicine began to seek ways to standardize the practice of medicine and to assure that traditional practitioners met the standards.  In response to the New York State Medical Society’s call for a national meeting of medical societies, the American Medical Association (AMA) emerged in 1847. One of AMAs first actions was to accept a code of ethics that distinguished traditional doctors from ‘new school’ doctors’."

• 1848: The Board of Medical Censors created in Texas in 1837 was discontinued by legislative act in 1848.  There was no medical regulation in Texas until 1873 – 25 years later.

• 1853:  Thirty-five medical physicians from eighteen counties assembled in Austin on January 17, 1853 to organize the Texas Medical Association, which they charted with the state as The Medical Association of Texas.  Their constitution of 1853 allowed "every gentleman of the Medical Profession" to become a member, but irregularly trained doctors were specifically excluded.  It was inactive for the next sixteen years.  It can be said that the medical profession allowed no competition, and tolerated no new ideas other than those conforming to orthodox medical training.  New thoughts could be, and usually were, condemned as quackery. 

• February 1, 1861: Texas Secedes from the Union and joins the Confederacy.

• May 12-13, 1865: Battle of Palmito Ranch: In far south Texas is the last land battle of the civil war with casualties and ends with a Confederate victory.

• June 2, 1865: Confederate forces west of the Mississippi under Confederate General Edmund Kirby Smith surrenders at Galveston, Texas becoming the last to do so.

• June 19, 1865: The Unions Major General Gordon Granger lands at Galveston, Texas and informs the people of Texas of the Emancipation Proclamation (an event celebrated in modern times each year as Juneteenth and made a federal holiday in 2021).

• 1873;  Another medical regulatory act is passed for Texas. 

• 1878:  A man named Harvey Lillard lost hearing in his left ear after lifting a heavy weight while in a stooped and cramped position.  

• September 18, 1895:  Harvey Lillard became the first “chiropractic patient” when D. D. Palmer successfully adjusted his spine. 

• Late fall 1895, Palmer had developed four methods of adjusting the vertebrae of the spine.  

• Summer 1896, Palmer trained a few individuals in the new-school healing art of chiropractic. 

• 1898: Chiropractic students of D. D. Palmer in 1898 included Texan Andrew P. Davis, MD, DO, DC, who is the first practicing chiropractic doctor of Texas. 

Article:

By Chris Dalrymple, D.C., F.I.C.C 

First half of 1800s:  “The practice of medicine was deregulated during the first half of the 1800s.”  “This period saw the growth of new schools of thought about how to practice medicine.  Lay healers, bone setters, botanic Thompsonians, homeopaths, eclectics, and others began to offer medical services, and these ‘new schools’ of medicine rapidly produced practitioners for the masses.  States began to repeal licensing laws, and by 1849, only New Jersey and the District of Columbia had laws that set out anything close to a regulatory scheme." 

1800:  Thirteen of the 16 existing states had given their state medical societies the authority to both examine and license university-trained and apprentice-trained practitioners.

1803:  Massachusetts allows Harvard Medical School to license its graduates and other states also began to permit their medical schools to license their graduates creating an "alternative pathway to a medical license encouraging a rapid proliferation of medical schools in the early 1800s.  "Those who entered the medical schools were not required to have a high school education, and some of the medical schools provided no more than a few months of training before licensing their graduates.  Furthermore, most [medical] schools provided no clinical training."