A Short History

No summary on this subject can be complete without a mention of Dr Andrew Taylor Still ‘discoverer’ of osteopathy, as he put it. 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 health system. It is an holistic approach and is currently being popularised in the West by 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. Littlejohn, a British physiologist with many other accreditations, brought home osteopathy to the UK, to found the first college in Britain - The British School of Osteopathy in London, 1917.

The first class in Osteopathy 1892-93