The role of the encyclopedic Howard System in the professionalization of chiropractic National College, 1906-1981

Abstract

D.D. Palmer, chiropractic's discoverer and nomenclator, lost his Palmer School to his son, B.J., in 1906. That same year, a Palmer graduate, John Fitz Alan Howard, founded the National School of Chiropractic in the Ryan Building in Davenport. In 1908, he moved National to Chicago to secure the clinical, laboratory, dissection, hospital, facilities, licensure and other advantages in Illinois. Within two years, Howard's commonsensical, science-based lectures encompassed virtually every major characteristic of the chiropractic profession as it stands today. Dr. Howard called it the "Howard System" of Chiropractic. National's presidents (Dr.s. Schulze and Janse) led faculty who continued to raise educational standards. Gradually, other surviving colleges embraced most of NCC's first seventy-five years of philosophic, scientific and artistic educational innovations, and thus the profession emerged.