It is worth dwelling on this period of Palmer’s life a little, as it implies he was either taken in by the tween charlatan he had married… or that he was willing to imply as much in his writing. Either way, it gives us some invaluable context to the next chapters of Palmer’s life. Once Lord had moved on, several marriages later, when a harsh Midwestern winter killed off Palmer’s bee business, Palmer reinvented himself as a magnetic healer before founding the chiropractic movement.

As the story goes, Palmer was practicing magnetic healing in his office in Davenport when he noticed that the building’s janitor, Harvey Lillard, had a severe hearing impairment. Palmer decided that such deafness had to be related to the presence of a lump he noticed on the janitor’s back, which he began to treat. Once the lump was treated, the deafness was miraculously cured, and chiropractic was born.