John McTimoney                    D D Palmer                     Mary Walker

Spinal manipulation is an ancient art. The earliest written account of it has been found in a Chinese document, the Kon Fou, dated around 2700BC. The early fathers of medicine, the Greek physicians Hippocrates and Galen, practised spinal manipulation and preached the importance of the spine in relation to health. As well as using manual adjustment, Hippocrates is credited with inventing a mechanical device for stretching the spine by traction; he also recommended sitting on patients if necessary!

Chiropractic began in 1895 when Harvey Lillard, janitor of the Ryan Building, where Daniel David Palmer, a practitioner of 'magnetic healing' had his office. Palmer began questioning Lillard about his condition, Lillard explained that 17 years before he had been stooping when he felt something give in his back; almost immediately, he'd lost his hearing.

On examining Lillard, he found a painful and prominent vertebra in his upper spine. Yes, said Lillard, that was the place that had hurt when he'd lost his hearing. Palmer asked him to lie face down on the treatment table, and exerted an energetic manual thrust on the vertebra in question. 

Shortly afterwards, Lillard announced that he was beginning to hear again. The first adjustment had been made and chiropractic was born.

Palmer had a theory and later wrote that the event was no accident; the adjustment was accomplished with an object in view, the result expected was obtained. There was nothing crude about this adjustment; it was specific. He had in fact been working towards this for some years.

In 1942 after a chiropractic treatment by Mr. Ashford, a chiropractor who had trained under DD Palmer, the discoverer of chiropractic, John McTimoney became fascinated by chiropractic, still a very little known therapy in Britain. He was struck by the logic of its philosophy of cause and effect and became eager to learn it himself.

In 1944 Mr. Ashford referred John McTimoney to a local chiropractor, Mary Walker, DC.

Mary Walker Due to illness Dr Walker was unable to fulfil her ambition of opening her own school of chiropractic. However, in the late 1940's she passed on her complete training, to two pupils, one of whom was John McTimoney. John's training took nearly three years and he described it as 'comprehensive and severe'.
After examination by two Doctors of Chiropractic from Palmer College he qualified in 1950.

As an engineer, John McTimoney began to look at the techniques he had been taught, and started to develop his own approach and technique variations. One such adjustment was known as the toggle-recoil, which he then developed into his own variation, the toggle-torque-recoil which consists of an extremely light and fast movement. The toggle is the thrust, the torque is applied during the thrust and the recoil is the immediate removal of the practitioner's hands, allowing the patient's body to react by itself, so that the adjustment is not imposed upon it. This technique respects the body's innate knowledge of what is appropriate for it at that moment. It is a means of gently, and usually painlessly, persuading the bone to return to its correct resting position without forcing or stressing the joint or the body.

Following his first heart attack, John McTimoney was asked to take on students in order to ensure the survival of his work. In 1972 with the help of his family he opened the Oxfordshire School of Chiropractic with 14 students. The School has evolved to become the McTimoney College of Chiropractic, enrolling up to 70 students per year who now graduate with a B.Sc. in Chiropractic. Students can study how to treat humans and animals, with the College now the premiere institution teaching chiropractic adjusting techniques for animals.

McTimoney taught, as DD Palmer had before him, that health depends on healthy nerve messages, that subluxations of the vertebrae or other joints interfere with these, and that such subluxations can affect not only joints and muscles, but every cell and organ in the body. He also stressed what would one day be called holism: that human beings are not purely physical but mental, emotional and spiritual beings as well, and that treating the whole body restores health to all these aspects of the patient.