Daily Inspiration Quote by Daniel D. Palmer

Persecution is doing a lot of work here: it’s not just a complaint, it’s a credential. Daniel D. Palmer, the self-mythologizing founder figure of chiropractic, frames “the advancement of all sciences” as a story that inevitably includes martyrs. By placing his own controversial project inside that grand narrative, he borrows the moral authority of Galileo-style struggle without having to win the argument on evidence alone.

The wording is strategic. “All sciences” turns a particular fight - over legitimacy, licensing, and medical turf - into an almost natural law of progress. “Especially where there has been such a radical change” quietly flatters the speaker’s innovation as paradigm-shifting, not merely disputed. The passive voice (“have been attended”) is a rhetorical sleight-of-hand: persecution appears like bad weather that follows discovery, not like an active conflict driven by competing standards, institutional power, and, yes, sometimes dubious claims.

Context matters: late 19th- and early 20th-century America was a marketplace of health systems, from osteopathy to patent medicines, colliding with an increasingly professionalized, credentialed medical establishment. Palmer faced legal trouble and harsh opposition; he also profited from a movement that needed believers, students, and a cohesive identity. Casting criticism as persecution turns skepticism into persecution, regulators into villains, and adherence into a kind of moral courage.

The subtext is recruitment. If opposition is proof, then the more the mainstream resists, the more “radical change” must be happening - and the less you have to engage with the mainstream’s demands.