to soften the corn and then cleaned it out with a dull bone blade. Kenison learned the procedure, settled down in Boston, and in 1840 hung out a shingle directly across from the Old South Church.The practice of modern chiropody had begun. Before long, Kenison was teaching students, albeit informally, and the profession had begun as well.2 Progress was slow but steady through the rest of the century, helped along by the efforts of the four-generation dynasty founded by Kenison along with other first families, such as the Kahlers of Pennsylvania. The first American treatise on chiropody was produced in 1862, the same year that Isachar Zacharie, perhaps podiatry’s first expert self-promotor, began to treat Abraham Lincoln, who suffered in his size 14 shoes.3 Within another generation there was growing awareness of the problems caused by flat feet, with a commensurate interest in inserts, arch supports, and special footwear.4 Still the maturing practice of medicine shunned chiropody, dismissing its practitioners as mere “corn cutters.” But the physicians were willfully missing the point.The most serious of the aspiring chiropodists were not interested in purveying a few moneymaking tricks. They had abandoned their study of hands to focus on a comprehensive understanding of the physiology of the human foot. Most were less interested in performing heroic measures than in making smaller adjustments that enabled them to relieve pain and avert deeper damage while keeping their patients on their feet as much as possible. These serious practitioners started to call themselves podiatrists and began to refer to mainstream medical practitioners as allopathic physicians, a term coined by the Isachar Zacharie, Lincoln’s chiropodist. originator of homeopathy to denote those who favored drugs, surgery, and other heroic measures over more subtle methods.5 There were places where the new profession was taken seriously. In 1895 the state of New York passed a law regulating chiropody, and within a few years a professional organization, the Pedic Society of the State of New York, was thriving.6 Given newfound recognition, these practitioners began writing papers and aspiring to establish a profession in the academic sense. They asked Maurice J. Lewi, a New York-born and Vienna-trained physician who was Secretary of the New York Board of Medical Examiners, for help. Lewi was impressed by their work and in 1911 helped establish the School of Chiropody of New York. The next year the state established academic requirements and provided for licensing of chiropodists by a board of regents. A few years later the New York school changed its name to the First Institute of Podiatry in recognition of its groundbreaking status. Lewi allowed that it was a “paradox” to be credentialing people who were not licensed practitioners of medicine, but he insisted that “the existing gap must be closed.”7 Across the country, other states were closing gaps, and other chiropodists were embarking on the journey of professionalization. In 1912 the National Association of
2