Bartlett Joshua Palmer: toward an understanding of the man, 1881-1961.

B.J. Palmer was clearly the most colorful of chiropractic's personalities and he exerted a powerful influence over the profession for many years and was perceived in a variety of ways. At the age of 18, his father abandoned the ownership and responsibility for the PSC and the profession was effectively transferred to him. From this point B.J.'s successes and his diplomatic failures evolved simultaneously. B.J.'s near-obsessive reductionistic traits appear to derive from his father's school teacher emphasis on reducing complex systems to simple explanations. B.J. and his father were at odds through life, yet B.J. remained respectful through his adult years until D.D. died in 1913. He was greatly influenced by his father's attitudes and admonitions and by his father's assumption that the Palmer family had a proprietary role in chiropractic.