Brief History of Osteopathy
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Doctor Andrew Taylor Still
No summary on this subject can be complete without a mention of Dr Andrew Taylor Still discoverer of osteopathy, as he put it. Dr Still, an American medical doctor and surgeon, founded the first school of osteopathy in Missouri in 1892 - the American School of Osteopathy (ASO), now called the Kirksville College of Osteopathic Medicine.
From Virginia, he served as an army doctor on both sides of the American Civil War. Following the tragic loss of his wife and three children from meningitis he became disillusioned with the orthodox medicine of the day, known as heroic medicine with good reason. Inspired by the philosophies of the native Americans and principles of Ayurveda (that he learned from two Swamis he met), he founded osteopathy in 1872. Western influences are thought to have been from the medieval art of bone setting still practiced in some remote areas of the UK.
Ayurveda (science of life), originally from the ancient Indian Veda (some of the earliest known Sanskrit texts approx. 5000 BC), is the oldest known philosophy and health system. It is an holistic approach and has beecome more popular in the west due to the works of Dr Deepak Chopra.
Amongst those who studied under A.T.Still were D.D.Palmer, William Garner Sutherland DO and Dr John Martin Littlejohn. Palmer went on to develop Chiropractics. Sutherland, after many years of study and experimentation developed Cranio-Sacral osteopathy. Like Still he did not accept any credit and insisted that the answers lay in nature and in the writings of A.T.Still. Dr Littlejohn, a British physiologist with many other accreditations, became the first professor of physiology at the ASO. He brought osteopathy home to the UK and founded the first college osteopathy in Britain in 1917 - The British School of Osteopathy in London, where he taught until he passed away in 1947.
The First Class of Osteopathy
In America osteopathy was recognised and incorporated into mainstream medicine in the 1960s. As a result they have specialised medical colleges that osteopathy is taught alongside orthodox medicine. However, often by their own admission, this has meant that the osteopathy has been somewhat diluted to a degree.
Dr John Martin Littlejohn
Dr Still & Dr Littlejohn
