Herbert Reaver

Dayton to Davenport

Herbert Reaver came to chiropractic as a patient and graduated from Palmer in 1928

Herbert Ross Reaver was born on April 30, 1906 in Dayton, Ohio. He was working as a professional musician and living with rheumatoid arthritis severe enough that he often used crutches. He met a group of chiropractic students in Iowa, was adjusted for the arthritis, and enrolled at the Palmer School of Chiropractic in 1927. He graduated in 1928 and went home to Ohio to practice.

The arthritis is the reason he was in the room

Reaver arrived as a patient with a chronic inflammatory condition and crutches. Every account of his career, including the International Chiropractors Association's own, starts there. He had been on the receiving end of the thing he later went to prison for.

He trained at Davenport and never changed his method

Reaver trained at Davenport under the analysis and technique that radiated from B.J. Palmer, who was then at the height of his influence over the profession. He kept that training for seventy years and never added instrumentation to it. He was still practicing in Cincinnati the week he died.

He married Millie and stayed married for nearly seventy years

Reaver's wife Millie survived him after a marriage of nearly seventy years. Their son, Herbert "Chap" Reaver Jr., practiced in Marietta, Georgia, wrote a column for Dynamic Chiropractic from 1984 to 1992, and published two novels. His first, Mote, won an Edgar Allan Poe Award in 1991 for best young adult mystery, and he died in 1993, seven years before his father.

The Ohio statute

Ohio recognized chiropractic in 1915 and placed its licensing under the state medical board

The Platt-Ellis Law passed in Ohio in 1915, took effect in 1916, and defined chiropractic as a limited branch of medicine or surgery. It was a compromise between medical and chiropractic interests. Callender lists chiropractic, naprapathy, spondylotherapy, mechanotherapy and magnetic healing among the methods the law grouped as minor healing arts, all examined by the State Medical Board of medical physicians. A chiropractor who practiced without that board's permit was practicing medicine without a license.

The statute created two definitions that could not be reconciled

Alana Callender, writing in Chiropractic History in 1995, traced six decades of Ohio turmoil to the two definitions inside the 1915 law. Chiropractors held that they did not practice medicine. The statute held that they practiced a limited branch of it. A.G. Lensgraf's 1997 case study of one Ohio practitioner in the years 1927 to 1935 describes licensing law that was ambiguous at best.

Hundreds of Ohio chiropractors chose jail over fines

Callender records that the 1920s in Ohio were marked by the civil disobedience already used successfully in other states, with hundreds of unlicensed chiropractors choosing jail rather than paying. In 1923 B.F. Lear and W.E. Quartier were fined five hundred dollars or 833 days in jail, the maximum for a first offense, and they chose the Trumbull County jail in Warren. That is more than two years.

D.D. Palmer had set the precedent in 1906

The first chiropractor jailed for practicing medicine without a license was the founder. D.D. Palmer served time in the Scott County jail in Iowa in the spring of 1906, in a cell measuring eight feet by eleven feet. Offered the alternative of a fine, he chose the cell, saying he was there for an abundance of principle rather than a lack of principal. Reaver was born that April.

Ohio jailed more chiropractors than any other state

M.L. Kimbrough surveyed the whole national record for Chiropractic History in 1998 and appended a state by state list of chiropractors who served time. Ohio was the harshest jurisdiction in the country and accounted for more than a third of everyone imprisoned. By 1931 the profession estimated roughly 15,000 prosecutions nationally against no more than about 12,000 practicing chiropractors.

Ohio did not get its own chiropractic board until 1975

Sixty years passed between the Platt-Ellis Law and the creation of a chiropractic board in Ohio, which the Ohio Legislative Service Commission dates to 1975. Louisiana had become the fiftieth state to license chiropractic the year before. Reaver was sixty nine years old when the state that jailed him created a board of his own profession.

The arrest record

Herbert Reaver was convicted twelve times in Cincinnati and served four jail terms

Who's Who in Chiropractic recorded the tally during Reaver's own lifetime as thirteen arrests, twelve convictions and four terms in jail, all in Cincinnati. It appears in the second edition of 1980 at page 203, and Joseph Keating reproduced it in his chronology. Dynamic Chiropractic's obituary counts twelve arrests. The two records agree on the twelve convictions and the four sentences.

Eight arrests and eight fines between 1928 and 1943

The charge in every case was practicing medicine without a license, and the fine was twenty five dollars. Reaver paid it eight times between 1928 and 1943 and returned to his practice the same day. Fifteen years of that is a business expense rather than a deterrent, which is exactly how he treated it.

What preceded the ninth arrest in 1943

In the summer of 1943 Reaver wrote to a local school principal objecting to mandatory vaccination. On September 30, 1943 a medical inspector called at his office to warn him that a group of local physicians had signed complaints against him. Asked why he was a repeat target, Reaver said he had stepped on a lot of medical toes and that the local doctors were jealous of his practice.

The ninth arrest was the one he refused to pay for

Paying the fine felt like admitting guilt, Reaver told an audience in 1997, and he said he was fighting for principle. He was arrested a ninth time in the summer of 1943 and declined to pay. He went to jail instead. Three more jail terms followed, and all four fall between 1943 and 1950.

The last sentence was six months

Dynamic Chiropractic dates the six month sentence to 1949 and places it after a twelfth arrest. Keating's chronology, drawing on a 1989 profile in Chiropractic Achievers, records a six month Ohio sentence in 1947 and a last arrest in 1950. The sources differ on which year carried which sentence, and agree on the total of four terms in custody.

A judge closed the file with a warning in 1950

After the last arrest a judge told Reaver he would be sentenced as a habitual offender if he appeared in court again. The Cincinnati Post carried the story of his planned departure for Florida on its front page on June 25, 1950. He left Ohio that year. He had been arrested in the same city, on the same charge, for twenty two years.

Inside

Reaver kept adjusting patients while he was in custody

The jail terms relocated the practice instead of ending it. Reaver continued giving adjustments to people who came to see him during his sentences. Dynamic Chiropractic's obituary records that more than three hundred people came to the jail during one term to mark his birthday.

The nickname came from the profession

Chiropractors called him Jailbird Reaver, and he used the name himself. The title of most jailed chiropractor in America attached to him during his lifetime and has never been seriously contested. Kimbrough's 1998 national survey turned up no one with a longer record.

The profession made a ceremony of the sentences

The 1923 Palmer Lyceum was dedicated to the chiropractors who had served jail time. Mac Searby told that gathering that going to jail parted people from their families. He added that the wreck of their practice was the least of their worries, and that they went back to the cells when the test came a second time. Callender preserved the passage. Reaver went back four times.

He remembered the campaign in specific terms

Speaking on camera in his nineties, Reaver described what practice in Ohio had actually involved. His words were: "We were despised, we were publicly humiliated, investigated, hounded, and they used entrapment on us. Innumerable trials and arrests, and convictions, and for some of us, prison." He added that a professional body that neglects its history tends to repeat it.

Every charge was practicing without a permit

The charge in every one of Reaver's arrests was practicing medicine without a license. He prescribed no drugs and performed no surgery. What he lacked was the permit the State Medical Board issued, and the permit he refused limited which cases he could accept. The prosecutions turned on the definition inside the 1915 statute.

Florida and the return

Reaver practiced in St. Petersburg for twenty two years and then went back to Cincinnati

Reaver and Millie moved to St. Petersburg, Florida in 1950. He stayed twenty two years, building a large practice that took in professional baseball players who came south for spring training. In 1972 he left an established Florida practice and returned to Cincinnati, the city where he had been arrested at least twelve times.

He practiced the same way he had been taught in 1928

Reaver never adopted instrumentation. Speaking to students at Life Chiropractic College West in 1997, he said that the instrumentation of his brain and his hands were all the instruments he needed. He used the analysis and the technique he had learned at Davenport for seven decades.

He was seeing patients the week he died

Reaver saw patients in his Cincinnati office on the Friday before he died. He died on February 7, 2000 at the age of ninety three, after more than seventy years in practice in Ohio and Florida. He had outlived by twenty five years the arrangement that jailed him.

What he wrote for the profession's press

Reaver wrote for The Chiropractor and left one line that the International Chiropractors Association still quotes. He held that the profession must not retreat a single inch from its stand on behalf of health freedom, so that together everyone might enjoy the abundance of health chiropractic can provide. It is a policy sentence rather than a clinical one, which is the fight he spent his career in.

The ICA years

Reaver served as vice president of the International Chiropractors Association under B.J. Palmer

Reaver held the vice presidency of the International Chiropractors Association in the second half of the 1940s, while B.J. Palmer was its president. Who's Who in Chiropractic records the term. The ICA awarded him a fellowship in 1950. He held office in the organization during the same years he was serving jail terms.

The Green Books record his election

B.J. Palmer's Up From Below the Bottom, published in 1950, reprints a letter from Charles Heiss dated May 10, 1949. Heiss refers to a dispute over the chairman's ruling at the time of the election of Vice President Reaver. The passage sits on page 621. Keating's chronology dates Reaver's election as third vice president to 1948, and Who's Who gives the term as running to 1950. The Heiss letter and the chronology corroborate each other.

The ICA named him Chiropractor of the Year in 1997

The ICA Board of Directors selected Reaver unanimously as Chiropractor of the Year at the association's seventy first annual meeting, held May 16 to 18, 1997 in Burlingame, California. He was ninety one years old and in his sixty ninth year of active practice. The board amended the ICA bylaws at the same meeting to create an annual Herbert Ross Reaver Lifetime Achievement Award.

The award still carries his name

The ICA established the award while Reaver was alive to see it, and he died three years later. It is given annually and still carries his name. A profession that names a lifetime achievement award after a criminal record has made a decision about that record.

Two Reavers

Herbert Reaver and Clarence E. Reaver were brothers and are frequently confused

A second Ohio chiropractor named Reaver appears throughout the same period, and the two men are routinely conflated. Clarence E. Reaver graduated from the Palmer School of Chiropractic in 1941, thirteen years after Herbert. He founded and ran the Reaver School of Chiropractic in Dayton, Ohio. A 1999 memorandum from the Council on Chiropractic Education identifies Herbert Reaver Sr. as the brother of the founder, Dr. C.E. Reaver.

Clarence Reaver founded an integrated school in 1945

Clarence Reaver tried to enroll a Black patient named Dorothy Clark at the Palmer School in 1944 and was refused. He opened the Reaver School of Chiropractic in Dayton in 1945 in response, with a first class of one white and two Black students. Bobby Westbrooks documented the episode in Chiropractic History in 1982 and recorded Clarence Reaver's own estimate of 166 graduates, about two thirds of them Black. The school closed in 1951.

B.J. Palmer reprinted the Dayton school's bulletins

Two bulletins issued by the Reaver School of Chiropractic in Dayton in March 1950 appear verbatim in B.J. Palmer's Fight to Climb, published the same year, on pages 318 and 319. Palmer used them to argue against extending the length of chiropractic training. Those bulletins belong to Clarence Reaver's school, not to Herbert's practice.

Clarence Reaver wrote the Fifth Cervical Key

Clarence E. Reaver developed a method of applying toggle recoil to the fifth cervical vertebra and published it as Fifth Cervical Key in 1950. The book was reissued in 1977. That title is often listed alongside the Pierce-Stillwagon work in technique surveys. It has nothing to do with Herbert Reaver.

Clarence Reaver was also arrested, five times

Ohio's licensing law required chiropractors to sit a medically oriented basic science examination. Clarence Reaver refused, and Keating records five arrests between 1947 and 1951, the last carrying a thirty day workhouse sentence and several suspended sentences that would be enforced if he practiced again in Ohio. The legal pressure and the loss of students to a competing Dayton college closed his school in 1951. Two brothers were prosecuted under the same statute in the same decade.

The legal precondition and the tone through-line

Reaver refused a definition, and the definition he refused is the one the model restores

The charge against Reaver was never that he harmed a patient. It was that he practiced without the medical board's permit, and he would not take the permit because it called him a limited medical practitioner. That is a fight about what chiropractic is rather than about what it achieves. The Unified Model of Tone makes the same distinction the same way.

What the model claims an adjustment is

The model states what an adjustment is and declines to state what it cures. An adjustment is an input delivered to a regulated state of the nervous system and the tissues it governs. Reaver made the identity claim in a courtroom and paid for it in custody. Twelve convictions and four sentences bought the right to say what the work is.

The regulated state is the thing being adjusted

Tone is the organized state of the nervous system and the tissues under its control. It shows itself in the variability of a rhythm rather than its average, in the coupling between two rhythms, and in how a system recovers from a challenge. It can be recorded before any clinical outcome is known. That is a physiological claim about a state variable, made without reference to any disease.

The same input produces different results in different bodies

Input quality holds that the active ingredient is correspondence between the input and the point of leverage, and that force is secondary. The same adjustment delivered to two people produces two different results because the two bodies hold different tone. A profession built on that account works on a different variable from the one medicine treats.

The prosecutions were about a competing account of the body

The documented sequence before the 1943 arrest runs from a letter Reaver wrote objecting to mandatory vaccination, to a medical inspector's warning that local physicians had signed complaints, to the arrest. Reaver's own explanation was that he had a good practice and the local doctors were jealous of it. The 1915 statute placed licensure with the State Medical Board. Two accounts of the body were in circulation and one of them held the board.

The right to publish this material was established in court

The autonomic and coupling material here is education about a nervous system, published by a licensed profession. That license took eighty years to secure. Chester Wilk won the antitrust judgment in 1987 with George McAndrews arguing it. Reaver came four decades earlier and went to jail four times.

Reaver among the legends

How Herbert Reaver relates to the rest of the library

Herbert Reaver stands in a line that begins with D.D. Palmer, who served the first sentence in the Scott County jail in 1906, the year Reaver was born. Willard Carver was convicted and jailed in Oklahoma and turned the episode into a licensing act. Carl S. Cleveland Sr. raised money to feed the families of jailed chiropractors from Kansas City. Joseph Janse built the accreditation machinery that made the license defensible. Chester Wilk and George McAndrews finished the legal argument in federal court. The methods the licensed profession now teaches are cataloged across the technique library, and the full hall of legends traces the line whole.