The following story represents perhaps the first known osteopathic treatment occurring in June of 1854. The story is recorded in A.T. Still’s personal writings and is also documented in John Lewis’ book A. T. Still From the Dry Bone to the Living Man. During this time Dr. Still was practicing as a rural family doctor in Kansas, Still’s new science of osteopathy had not yet been named. The civil war had not yet started but tensions were rising, Kansas was a wild sometimes lawless land. Dr. Still was practicing medicine and living amongst the Native Americans on the newly formed Shawnee Indian reservation. He was still formulating his early ideas, conducting research and studying detailed anatomy, chemistry, physiology, biomechanics, to all of his studies, he writes that he applied spiritual insight and original thinking.
The First Osteopathic Treatment
While riding west along the Santa Fe Trail to make a house call, Still noticed in the distance a commotion surrounding a convoy of Mexican freight wagons, and on arriving at the scene saw a stock man lying on the ground apparently paralyzed, his head twisted at an odd angle. Onlookers said he had been thrown from his horse at a full gallop and broken his neck. Still introduced himself as a doctor and offered to try and straighten the vaquero’s neck, though he warned that the attempt might prove fatal. “Go on,” the foreman told him, ” he is worse than a dead man now.”
Still drove two picket pins into the ground to stabilize his patient’s shoulders and sitting with his feet braced against them, grasped the Mexican’s long black hair. Pulling steadily but carefully in line with the spine, he managed to reduce what turned out to be merely a dislocation. As sensation and motion began to return, the man lay quietly for a few minuets before uttering simply, “Muchas gracias, Senor.” Relief was mutual. ” I was muchas gracias myself that I had not killed him,” Still admitted. With in an hour the Mexican was back on his feet and the foreman rewarded the young doctor , for what was perhaps his first manual treatment with a $20 gold piece. From A. T. Still From the Dry Bone to the Living Man by John Lewis, 2012, Dry Bone Press.
The next article comes from the Autobiography of Andrew Taylor Still, and describes another early osteopathic treatment in the late summer of 1874. Osteopathy was now formally named but very much in it’s infancy. The Civil war was now over, deep wounds remained, Dr. Still was traveling from town to town in Kansas and Missouri treating patients, sharing his ideas and demonstrating the therapeutic potential of osteopathy. He was known by some as a lightning bone setter, others feared him, in some towns pastors and church clergy tried to run him out of town accusing him of devil worship, “He must be invoking the devil,” they said, “how else could he put his hands on someone and their pain disappears and they get better?” In actuality all of Dr. Stills treatments and adjustments were firmly rooted in science, anatomy, physiology and a keen observation of nature.
An Early Osteopathic Treatment
by A. T. Still MD DO
During the autumn I had an excellent opportunity to test Osteopathy on fall diseases, such as flux among children, bowel complaint, and fevers. My first case of flux was a little boy of about four summers. I was walking down the streets of Macon in company with a Colonel Eberman, when I drew his attention to fresh blood which had dripped along the street for fifty yards. A little in advance of us was a lady and two or three children slowly moving in the same direction we were going. We soon caught up with them, and discovered that her little boy, about four years old, was very sick. He had only a calico dress on, and to our wonder and surprise his legs and feet, which were bare, were covered with blood from his body down to the ground. A single glance was sufficient to convince us that they were poor, and the Colonel and I, feeling a wave of pity in our hearts, spoke gently to the mother, and offered our aid to get her sick children home. She accepted. I picked up the little sick boy, while the Colonel took one from the mother’s arms that she had carried until she was almost exhausted. I placed my hand on the back of the little fellow I carried, in the region of the lumbar, which was very warm, even hot, while the abdomen was cold.
My only thought was to help the woman and her children home, and little dreamed that I was to make a discovery that would bless future generations. While walking along I thought it strange that the back was so hot and the belly so cold; then the neck and back of his head were very warm, and the face, nose, and forehead cold. I began to reason, for I knew very little about flux, [other] than it killed young and old, and was worse in Kentucky in warm weather than in some other States. In all my life I had never asked myself what flux was . . . .
I did not know how to reason on diseases, because all the authorities I had read or met in council could not get their eyes off the effects rather than cause. They met pain by anti-pain medicines, and bleeding of bowels by astringents that closed the tissues from which the blood came, following such remedies to death’s door, and then lined up for another battle and defeat with the same old failing remedies, and open fire all along the line on symptoms only. I wondered why doctors were so badly frightened when flux visited their own families if their remedies were to be trusted.
I knew that a person had a spinal cord, but really I knew little, if anything, of its use. I had read in anatomy that the upper portion of the body was supplied with motor nerves from the front side of the spinal cord, and that the back side of the cord gave off the sensory nerves, but that gave no very great clue to what to do for flux. I began work at the base of the brain, and thought by pressure and rubbing I could push some of the hot to the cold places. While so doing I found rigid and loose places in the muscles and ligaments of the whole spine, while the lumbar was in a very congested condition. I worked for a few minutes on that philosophy, and told the mother to report to me the next day, and if I could do anything more for her boy I would cheerfully do so. She came early next morning with the news that her child was well. Flux was in a large percent of the families of Macon. The reader will remember that my home at that time was still in Baldwin, Kans., and I was only visiting in Macon. The lady whose child I had cured brought many people with their sick children to me for treatment. As nearly as I can remember, I had seventeen severe cases of flux in a few days, and cured them all without drugs.
From The Autobiography of A.T. Still