Dr. Andrew Tailer Still, the founder of Osteopathy, was born on August 6, 1828 to a simple, hardy German farmer, who was a physician by training and a missionary by choice. His mother, Martha was a Scottish.
Andrew was born in a remote village in Virginia, U.S.A. In 1845, they were at Macon Country, when Andrew was 17, he was sturdy and strong and lived close to nature. He would catch hares and squirrels in his fondness for animals.
He would even dissect them to find for himself the type of organs they had. He worked on farming implements with his father, who wanted him to be a Methodist minister, but he wanted to be a physician.
Relating an incident from his autobiography, he was ten years old, when he got a severe headache. He was in agony. He took a rope and made a swing of it between two trees, about 6-8 inches above the ground, put a small pillow over it and placed his neck on it, lay flat on the ground with his head hanging over the swing.
It was reasonably comfortable this way. He went to sleep and got up twenty minutes later, minus the headache. He used this method till he was twenty years old. At this juncture he reasoned out his initial discovery: “I could see that I had suspended the action of the great occipital nerves, and could give harmony to the flow of the arterial blood to and through the veins and ease effect”.
Along with farming he became interested in medicine. After medical degree, he served with the U.S. army as a surgeon during the American Civil War of 1867-68. Abraham Lincoln won and slavery was abolished. After the war, Dr. Still started his own private practice. The medical science, then, was not advanced much.
People were subjected to purges, emetics and strange concoctions with frustrating consequences. There was a popular saying that “he who takes medicine, must get well twice—once from the disease he has had, and then from the medicine he had taken”.
Since his youth-time swing-cure “discovery” for his headache, Dr. Still had been determined to develop a system of treatment of self-healing by the body in accordance with the laws of nature. The death of his wife and later, after second marriage, the death of his three sons who died before his eyes, of spinal meningitis, gave him a big jolt to his faith in medical science.
He experimented on his “discovery” with patients and evolved his theory that “the body possesses the power for self-healing and self-maintenance”. The Medical Science did not lend him encouragement in accepting his theory and the Baker University, too, turned down his paper of this theory and practice.
Dr. Still’s plans were, however helped by important medical progress that took Europe by storm in the 1880s. In England, Joseph Lister was working on the theory of antiseptic, in France, Louis Pasteur discovered the germ theory, and in Germany Rudolph Virchow was making advances in physiology.
Dr. Still was convinced that many aches and pains are due to nerve irritation leading to muscle spasm, which affects other systems of the body. His experiments in Osteopathy were simple. He fitted a stout bench-like table in the consulting room. It was long enough for a person to lie on, but not wide enough.
The patient was made to lie on the table. Sensitive fingers would run over the spine, there would be quick movements and the agonising pain was gone. The patients could not understand why a doctor would only push and pull to treat a patient, instead of prescribing the usual pill or a bottle of medicine. But relief from Dr. Still’s new method was remarkable. He began attracting a growing number of patients.
The news spread far and wide and with that Dr. Still’s fame. With the cooperation of other doctors, who were attracted to his new method, he founded the osteopath medicine group and launched the first College of Osteopathy in Kirksville, Missouri in November, 1892. From America, Osteopathy spread fast to England and Europe.
The British Osteopathic Association was formed in 1911 and then came the London College of Osteopathy, with specialisation for medical graduates in advanced anatomy, neurology and Osteopathy—theory and practice.
By the time Dr. Andrew Tailer Still died in November, 1917, more than 5,000 Osteopathic physicians were practising in America and 18,000 in the whole West. A pioneer exponent of Osteopathy in India, is Dr. Krishna Murari Modi, Mumbai. He began as an Orthopaedist at the Safdarjung Hospital in New Delhi.
In having treated complicated cases, he became aware of one anomaly— “We are so effective in the treatment of fractured bones and other ailments, yet why is it that we cannot help the patients with chronic aches and pains”. He, then, found in our ancient Indian medical treatises, manipulation of the spine and different joints mentioned, as one form of treatment.
“Why were we not using such a treatment”, he argued with himself. This led Dr. Modi to specialise in Osteopathy at the London College.
Dr. Modi regrets that, while in America and England, Osteopathy is very much encouraged, in its “homeland” of India, it is very much neglected. A pity he feels, because with simple Osteopathic treatment, millions of poor manual labourers and mill workers of low-income people-too-can get self-cure from chronic ailments of aches, pains and sores that afflict the body.