| Abstract/Notes |
From the time of Hippocrates through the Middle Ages, spinal manipulative therapy was one of the treatment options prized by professional physicians. A vernacular medical literature in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries purportedly was written to teach this treatment option to folk practitioners. An examination of that literature, and of the Latin literature that coexisted with it, leads to the conclusion, however, that doctors did not abandon these methods to bonesetters until two centuries later.
The fact that only folk practitioners of bonesetting perpetuated these methods in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries attached a low status to manipulation. That stigma persists into the present, despite the efforts of doctors of osteopathy, chiropractic and medicine to revive and modernize this approach to spinal joint problems.
Paper delivered by Donald C. Sutherland, D.C., L.L.D. before the third Conference on Chiropractic History, National College of Chiropractic, Lombard, Ill. June 4, 1983.
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