2023-12-16 14:43:50
NARRATIVE – In the 1950s, chiropractors began to promote their profession by organizing beauty contests focused on the posture of the candidates, supported by x-rays.
On October 5, 1967, a pretty young woman walked in the Rose Garden of the White House, in the company of American President Lindon Johnson. Ruth McCarter is one of the last “Posture Queens”. A beauty queen of a special kind: selection criterion n°1, a perfectly aligned spine. X-ray supporting…
Since the 1920s, young women have paraded, in stiletto heels matched with an evening dress or a swimsuit, under the watchful eye of impartial judges. They win a scarf, prizes, the attention of newspapers, television and a few powerful people. Miss France was born in 1920, Miss America in 1921, Miss Europe in 1928… Beauty contests became the most commonplace. And the associations of chiropractors are also launching into the election of the straightest back. Objective: to make their art known, the very young chiropractic.
Chiropractic, coming from “another world”
This alternative medicine was born in 1895 in the mind of Daniel David Palmer, magnetizer, who explained having received chiropractic from a “other world” and want to practice it like “a religion”. According to legend, the first person whose spine Palmer manipulated was his building caretaker, who was said to have regained his hearing… Palmer was imprisoned for illegally practicing medicine, but he then founded a school and publishes books, then his son takes up the torch and develops the techniques imagined by his father. Doctors, however, have some minor reservations regarding this strange type of “therapy”. You therefore have to make yourself known and convince customers. “Chiropractic had a public relations problem. At the time, we didn’t have a license to practice.”recalled in 2012 to Shots Reginald Hug, American practitioner and former president of the Association for the History of Chiropractic. “We were the newcomers and medicine didn’t like us.»
Posture has become a matter of good habits and poor posture a sign of poor personal values.
Chiropractic, however, has its chance: America then has an obsession, its posture. As corsets disappear, clothes become more comfortable and sofas softer, men, women and children must learn to stand up straight. “Posture has become a matter of good habits and bad posture a sign of poor personal values”wrote in 1998 in the American Historical Review history student David Yosifon and his professor Peter Stearns, from Carnegie Mellon University. This is good: chiropractors know posture. They make a profession of readjusting the spine, even inventing “Spinalysers” and other “Posturometers” supposed to scientifically analyze the straightness of human bodies.
A photo, a radio and two scales
In 1927, therefore, the American Chiropractic Association organized the first “Most Perfect Spine Competition” at its convention, Reginald Hug recounted in 2008 in the Journal of Chiropractic Humanities . Over the years, various competitions with changing names are organized, bringing together more and more candidates. But in 1954, chiropractor Clair O’Dell had an idea: why not, in addition to having the candidates parade under the eye of experts responsible for judging their beauty, their presence and their posture, convince themselves of the perfection of their spine thanks to an x-ray? In 1955 she was elected the first “World Queen of Posture”. Chiropractors wishing to present a candidate must send her photo, and an x-ray of her complete spine, the alignment of the body and vertebrae becomes the main criterion. In addition to the x-ray examination, each candidate must stand on two scales (one foot for each): if they display exactly the same weight, this is supposed to confirm a perfectly balanced standing position, reports the Chicago Tribune…
Very quickly, it was a popular success. Magazines Life or Time report on it, the candidates parade in festive parades, the winners are interviewed on television. Clair O’Dell has fulfilled his objective, judge Reginald Hug, he has devoted “the prestige of the profession”. America, for its part, still cares about standing up straight and in 1963, President John Fitzgerald Kennedy established a Presidential Council on Physical Fitness and Sports, which notably promoted the Kraus-Weber tests, a set of 6 exercises to assess the strength and flexibility of the main postural muscles.
The dangers of X-rays
Over time, however, society relaxes and medicine understands that “standing up straight” is not that important. The body relaxes, the back learns to twist, bend, stretch again. The “Miss Posture” competition disappeared quietly towards the end of the 1960s. Chiropractors no longer needed it anyway, they had earned their letters of nobility in America and no longer needed such artifice to compete. impose on the health landscape.
Most of them also ended up learning, although a little late, that you can’t play with have fun having all or part of your skeleton photographed. But when Clair O’Dell suggests subjecting young women to them for a reason as futile as a beauty contest, it has been around thirty years since we became aware of the dangerousness of X-rays, and that the We try to reserve them only for cases where they are useful. Was a crown really worth rays?
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