• Gibbons RW

• Obstetrics

While there is a contemporary debate within chiropractic today which questions alleged intrusions into medical practice, there is ample historical data to substantiate early general practice by chiropractors in the field of obstetrics. The first "chiropractic accoucher" may in fact have been D.D. Palmer himself, who is known to have signed birth as well as death certificates in late 19th Century Davenport, and who accepted pregnancy as a biological process, and not disease in his 1910 work. The first competing school to Palmer in 1905 established a chair in obstetrics and the first recorded license to practice that year (in Illinois) was for "chiropractic and midwifery". The early announcements of the Palmer School declared that its instruction in obstetrics was "sufficient to qualify the student to pass any of the state boards examinations in midwifery." Medicine's assault on what one journal termed "the meddlesome midwife" was equaled only by the fury with which it sought to dispatch chiropractic from the therapeutic arena. Chiropractors who practiced OB became particular objects for harrassment, yet surprisingly it existed, if not flourished in several states through half of this century and still exists in Oregon.

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