History of osteopathy

Abstract

In 1874 Andrew Taylor Still, MD (1828–1917) suggested a hypothesis that addressed preventive medicine. His supposition was simply that the body contained within itself healing substances and means of combating disease. The discoveries of immunology have substantiated this hypothesis rather than supplanted it. Still was a frontier doctor who developed in the crucible of turbulent times and was motivated by a personal tragedy. Like his more sophisticated and ‘acceptable’ medical colleagues and predecessors, Still was dissatisfied with the status quo of medicine. He was one of the first in his time to point out that if one studied the attributes of health one might be better able to understand the handicaps and processes of disease. In Hoag, Cole and Bradford’s publication, Osteopathic Medicine, it is written that during Still’s time in medical history, the practice of medicine was for the most part in confusion. In the post-Civil War period, ‘Cnidian practice’ was especially rampant, named after one of the ancient schools of Greek medicine at Cnidus (Knidos). Meerloo (1964) describes it as follows:

In ancient Greece we find this controversy (between the two schools of medicine) expressed in the antinomy between the two dominant medical schools, the one on the Isle of Kos, the other from the town of Knidos.

To ask a doctor’s opinion of osteopathy is equivalent to going to Satan for information about Christianity

Mark Twain