This preposterous quackery flourishes lushly in the back reaches of the
                        Republic, and begins to conquer the less civilized folk of the big cities. As the
                        oldtime family doctor dies out in the country towns, with no competent
                        successor willing to take over his dismal business, he is followed by some
                        hearty blacksmith or ice-wagon driver, turned into a chiropractor in six
                        months, often by correspondence. In Los Angeles the Damned there are
                        probably more chiropractors than actual physicians, and they are far more
                        generally esteemed. Proceeding from the Ambassador Hotel to the heart of
                        the town, along Wilshire boulevard, one passes scores of their gaudy signs;
                        there are even many chiropractic "hospitals." The morons who pour in from
                        the prairies and deserts, most of them ailing, patronize these "hospitals"
                        copiously, and give to the chiropractic pathology the same high respect that
                        they accord to the theology of the town sorcerers. That pathology is
                        grounded upon the doctrine that all human ills are caused by the pressure of
                        misplaced vertebra upon the nerves which come out of the spinal cord-in
                        other words, that every disease is the result of a pinch. This, plainly enough, is
                        buncombe. The chiropractic therapeutics rest upon the doctrine that the way
                        to get rid of such pinches is to climb upon a table and submit to a heroic
                        pummeling by a retired piano-mover. This, obviously, is buncombe doubly
                        damned.

                        Both doctrines were launched upon the world by an old quack named
                        Andrew T. Still, the father of osteopathy. For years the osteopaths
                        merchanted them and made money at the trade. But as they grew opulent
                        they grew ambitious, ie., they began to study anatomy and physiology. The
                        result was a gradual abandonment of Papa Still's ideas. The high-toned
                        osteopath of today is a sort of eclectic. He tries anything that promises to
                        work, from tonsillectomy to the X-rays. With four years' training behind him,
                        he probably knows more anatomy than the average graduate of the Johns
                        Hopkins Medical School, or at all events, more osteology. Thus enlightened,
                        he seldom has much to say about pinched nerves in the back. But as he
                        abandoned the Still revelation it was seized by the chiropractors, led by
                        another quack, one Palmer. This Palmer grabbed the pinched nerve nonsense
                        and began teaching it to ambitious farm-hands and out-at-elbow Baptist
                        preachers in a few, easy lessons. Today the backwoods swarm with
                        chiropractors, and in most States they have been able to exert enough
                        pressure on the rural politicians to get themselves licensed. Any lout with
                        strong hands and arms is perfectly equipped to become a chiropractor. No
                        education beyond the elements is necessary. The takings are often high, and
                        so the profession has attracted thousands of recruits-retired baseball players,
                        work-weary plumbers, truck-drivers, longshoremen, bogus dentists, dubious
                        preachers, cashiered school superintendents. Now and then a quack of some
                        other school-say homeopathy-plunges into it. Hundreds of promising students
                        come from the intellectual ranks of hospital orderlies.

                        Such quackeries suck in the botched, and help them on to bliss eternal. When
                        these botched fall into the hands of competent medical men they are very
                        likely to be patched up and turned loose upon the world, to beget their kind.
                        But massaged along the backbone to cure their lues, they quickly pass into
                        the last stages, and so their pathogenic heritage perishes with them. What is
                        too often forgotten is that nature obviously intends the botched to die, and
                        that every interference with that benign process is full of dangers. That the
                        labors of quacks tend to propagate epidemics and so menace the lives of all
                        of us, as is alleged by their medical opponents-this I doubt. The fact is that
                        most infectious diseases of any seriousness throw out such alarming
                        symptoms and so quickly that no sane chiropractor is likely to monkey with
                        them. Seeing his patient breaking out in pustules, or choking, or falling into a
                        stupor, he takes to the woods at once, and leaves the business to the nearest
                        medical man. His trade is mainly with ambulant patients; they must come to
                        his studio for treatment. Most of them have lingering diseases; they tour all the
                        neighborhood doctors before they reach him. His treatment, being
                        nonsensical, is in accord with the divine plan. It is seldom, perhaps, that be
                        actually kills a patient, but at all events he keeps many a worthy soul from
                        getting well.

                        The osteopaths, I fear, are finding this new competition serious and
                        unpleasant. As I have said, it was their Hippocrates, the late Dr. Still, who
                        invented all of the thrusts, lunges, yanks, hooks and bounces that the lowly
                        chiropractors now employ with such vast effect, and for years the osteopaths
                        had a monopoly of them But when they began to grow scientific and
                        ambitious their course of training was lengthened until it took in all sorts of
                        tricks and dodges borrowed from the regular doctors, or resurrection men,
                        including the plucking of tonsils, adenoids and appendices, the use of the
                        stomach-pump, and even some of the legerdemain of psychiatry. They now
                        harry their students furiously and turn them out ready for anything from
                        growing hair on a bald head to frying a patient with the x-rays. All this new
                        striving, of course, quickly brought its inevitable penalties. The osteopathic
                        graduate, having sweated so long, was no longer willing to take a case of
                        delirium tremens for $2, and in consequence he lost patients. Worse, very few
                        aspirants could make the long grade. The essence of osteopathy itself could
                        be grasped by any lively farm-hand or night watchman in a few weeks, but
                        the borrowed magic baffled him. Confronted by the phenomenon of
                        gastrulation, or by the curious behavior of heart muscle, or by any of the
                        current theories of immunity, he commonly took refuge, like his brother of the
                        orthodox faculty, in a gulp of laboratory alcohol, or fled the premises
                        altogether. Thus he was lost to osteopathic science, and the chiropractors
                        took him in; nay, they welcomed him. He was their meat. Borrowing that
                        primitive part of osteopathy which was comprehensible to the meanest
                        understanding, they threw the rest overboard, at the same time denouncing it
                        as a sorcery invented by the Medical Trust. Thus they gathered in the garage
                        mechanics, ash-men and decayed welter-weights, and the land began to fill
                        with their graduates. Now there is a chiropractor at every cross-roads.

                        I repeat that it eases and soothes me to see them so prosperous, for they
                        counteract the evil work of the so-called science of public hygiene, which
                        now seeks to make imbeciles immortal. If a man, being ill of a pus appendix,
                        resorts to a shaved and fumigated longshoreman to have it disposed of, and
                        submits willingly to a treatment involving balancing him on McBurney's spot
                        and playing on his vertebrae as on a concertina, then I am willing, for one, to
                        believe that he is badly wanted in Heaven. And if that same man, having
                        achieved lawfully a lovely babe, hires a blacksmith to cure its diphtheria by
                        puffing its neck, then I do not resist the divine will that there shall be one less
                        radio fan later on. In such matters, I am convinced, the laws of nature are far
                        better guides than the fiats and machinations of medical busybodies. If the
                        latter gentlemen had their way, death, save at the hands of hangmen,
                        policemen and other such legalized assassins, would be abolished altogether,
                        and the present differential in favor of the enlightened would disappear. I can't
                        convince myself that that would work any good to the world. On the
                        contrary, it seems to me that the current coddling of the half-witted should be
                        stopped before it goes too far -if, indeed, it has not gone too far already. To
                        that end nothing operates more cheaply and effectively than the prosperity of
                        quacks. Every time a bottle of cancer oil goes through the mails Homo
                        americanus is improved to that extent. And every time a chiropractor spits
                        on his hands and proceeds to treat a gastric ulcer by stretching the backbone
                        the same high end is achieved.

                        But chiropractic, of course, is not perfect. It has superb potentialities, but only
                        too often they are not converted into concrete cadavers. The hygienists
                        rescue many of its foreordained customers, and, turning them over to agents
                        of the Medical Trust, maintained at the public expense, get them cured.
                        Moreover, chiropractic itself is not certainly fatal: even an Iowan with
                        diabetes may survive its embraces. Yet worse, I have a suspicion that it
                        sometimes actually cures. For all I know (or any orthodox pathologist seems
                        to know) it may be true that certain malaises are caused by the pressure of
                        vagrom vertebrae upon the spinal nerves. And it may be true that a hearty
                        ex-boilermaker, by a vigorous yanking and kneading, may be able to relieve
                        that pressure. What is needed is a scientific inquiry into the matter, under rigid
                        test conditions, by a committee of men learned in the architecture and
                        plumbing of the body, and of a high and incorruptible sagacity. Let a thousand
                        patients be selected, let a gang of selected chiropractors examine their
                        backbones and deter mine what is the matter with them, and then let these
                        diagnoses be checked up by the exact methods of scientific medicine.

                        Then let the same chiropractors essay to cure the patients whose maladies
                        have been determined. My guess is that the chiropractors' errors in diagnosis
                        will run to at least 95% and that their failures in treatment will push 99%. But I
                        am willing to be convinced.

                        Where is such a committee to be found? I undertake to nominate it at ten
                        minutes' notice. The land swarms with men competent in anatomy and
                        pathology, and yet not engaged as doctors. There are thousands of hospitals,
                        with endless clinical material. I offer to supply the committee with cigars and
                        music during the test. I offer, further, to supply both the committee and the
                        chiropractors with sound wet goods. I offer, finally, to give a bawdy banquet
                        to the whole Medical Trust at the conclusion of the proceedings.