1978 — After several years of pleading with the national membership society for the creation of a scholarly journal of chiropractic, Joseph Janse, DC, ND, president of the National College of Chiropractic (NCC), decided that his institution must take the initiative.

Drs. Joseph Janse	Roy Hildebrandt

Janse turned to Roy W. Hildebrandt, DC, former head of the radiology department at Palmer College of Chiropractic and by then head of publications at NCC, to investigate what would be required. Hildebrandt determined that the college would have to invest sole authority for the periodical in an editor, that a process of blinded-peer-review of all contributed articles would be necessary and that a $100,000 commitment from NCC would be required to keep the publication in operation for the first few years.

Hildebrandt anticipated that he would need to create a market for scientific information within the profession and that some resistance might be expected due to traditional inter-school rivalries within the profession.

In March 1978 the first issue of NCC’s Journal of Manipulative & Physiological Therapeutics (JMPT) was published. In 1981 Hildebrandt received word that the JMPT would be indexed by the National Library of Medicine in its inter-disciplinary sourcework, Index Medicus. In the years since, the JMPT has become the profession’s preeminent journal of science and scholarship.

In 1986 Dana J. Lawrence, DC assumed the editorship of the periodical.