About Osteopathy

Andrew Taylor Still, D.O. (August 6, 1828 – December 12, 1917) is considered the father of osteopathy and osteopathic medicine. Over his lifetime, he was also a physician & surgeon, author, inventor and Kansas territorial & state legislator. He was one of the founders of Baker University, the oldest 4-year college in the state of Kansas, and was the founder of the American School of Osteopathy (now A.T. Still University), the world’s first osteopathic medical school and hospital, in Kirksville, Missouri.

Still believed that osteopathy was a necessary discovery, because the current medical practices of his day often caused significant harm and conventional medicine had failed to shed light on the etiology and effective treatment of disease.

At the time A.T. Still practiced as a physician, medications, surgery, and other traditional therapeutic regimens often caused more harm than good. Some of the medicines commonly given to patients during this time often resulted in more deaths than cures. Dr. Still sought to reform existing 19th century medical practices. He investigated alternative treatments, such as hydropathy, diet, bone-setting, and magnetic healing. Still found appeal in the relatively tame side effects of those modalities, and imagined that someday “rational medical therapy” would consist of manipulation of the musculoskeletal system, surgery and very sparingly used drugs. 

He invented the name “osteopathy” by blending two Greek roots: osteon for bone, and pathos for suffering, in order to communicate his theory that disease and physiologic dysfunction were etiologically grounded in a disordered musculoskeletal system. Thus, by diagnosing and treating the musculoskeletal system, he believed that physicians could treat a variety of diseases and spare patients the negative side-effects of drugs. 

A.T. Still founded the first school of osteopathy based on this new approach to medicine – the school was called the American School of Osteopathy (A.S.O.) (now A.T. Still University) in Kirksville, Missouri in 1892. Interestingly also, close to half of the first class of the A.S.O. were women, something that was very uncommon in medicine at the time. Still was also one of the first physicians to promote the idea of preventative medicine and the philosophy that physicians should focus on treating the disease rather than just the symptoms.