From logs to hogs, Mexican freighters to blushing brides…
Posted: June 29, 2011
Stories on the journey to discovery
The stories presented here – Dr. Still’s discoveries – are key to OMM. A patient’s body structure problems often have the exact same symptoms – fever, shortness of breath, swelling, sweating, and pain – as diseases such as pneumonia, cholera, influenza, etc. Only once structure issues are corrected can the body heal. This is why Dr. Still insisted his students know anatomy and look at the patient’s structure first – and to other possible problems next.
It’s been said that necessity is the mother of invention, and thus it was with the discovery of osteopathic medicine as a healing art.
The discovery occurred not in one single incident, but rather a long series of events, growing into a whole territory of revelation – a slow accumulation of incidents until at some definite date they were seen for the first time in a single perspective, and their importance finally understood.
Ernest E. Tucker first met A.T. Still, M.D., D.O., as a young patient. He came back as a student to graduate from and became a faculty member of the founding school. During his 17-year mentoring friendship with Dr. Still, he recorded a series of conversions in which the old doctor explained the evolution and events that led him to osteopathic medicine.
Dr. Still wrote in his autobiography, published in 1897, “I will conclude this chapter of my boyhood experience with an incident which, simple as it was, may be said to be my first discovery in the science of osteopathy …
“One day, when about 10 years old, I suffered from a headache. I made a swing of my father’s plow-line between two trees; but my head hurt too much to make swinging comfortable, so I let the rope down to about 8 or 10 inches off the ground, threw the end of a blanket on it, and I lay down on the ground and used the rope for a swinging pillow. Thus I lay stretched on my back, with my neck across the rope. Soon I became easy and went to sleep, got up in a little while with headache all gone. As I knew nothing of anatomy, I took no thought of how a rope could stop headache and the sick stomach which accompanied it.
“After that discovery I roped my neck whenever I felt one of those spells coming on. I followed that treatment for 20 years before the wedge of reason reached my brain, and I could see that I had suspended the action of the great occipital nerves, and given harmony to the flow of the arterial blood to and through the veins, and ease was the effect, as the reader can see. I have worked from the days of a child, for more than 50 years, to obtain a more thorough knowledge of the workings of the machinery of life, to produce ease and health.”
Another incident occurred when he came down with dysentery or flux. “A log was lying in my father’s yard. In the effort to get comfort I threw myself across it on the small of my back and made a few twisting motions which probably restored the misplaced bones to their normal position, for soon the pain began to leave, my abdomen began to get warm, the chilly sensation disappeared, and that was the last of the flux.”
Another event on his road to discovery involved a woman he saw die of cholera in Kansas in 1855. “The contraction of the gluteal system of muscles was so strong as to cause a dislocation of her hip, throwing it out at right angles,” he said. “This, I was called upon to adjust before she could be placed in her coffin. Other doctors told me of similar cases, and I soon learned that muscular contractions would produce partial dislocation of any bone in the body, and produce curvatures and other malformations. “
Dr. Still’s exposure to the deceased woman’s hip dislocation and his successes from his own physical ailments led him to the idea that the alignment of bones and tissues held answers to recovery from disease. “I sat down to my desk on the prairie to study over what I had learned at medical schools. With the theory firmly fixed in my mind that the ‘greatest study of man is man,’ I began with the skeleton. I improved my store in anatomical knowledge until I was quite familiar with every bone in the human body. The study of these bodies of ours has ever been fascinating to me.”
Another incident, in Palmyra, Kan., in May 1855, proved to him that successful realignment could restore full nerve and muscle use. Early one morning while riding on the Santa Fe road headed West, he came upon Mexican freighters who moved goods from Kansas City to Old Mexico. Sensing trouble, he approached the group and was told a man was thrown from his horse and had broken his neck.
By the aid of two picket pins (an iron stake with a swivel ring that when driven into the ground can hold a horse by the rein) driven three or four inches apart, about the width of the man’s neck, which held his body from moving any further, “I took him by the hair of his head, placed my feet against the picket pins and pulled his head carefully on a straight line with neck and spine, and by this method I readjusted the dislocated bone of his neck to its proper articulation with his head,” Dr. Still said. “He lay a few minutes, and in less than half an hour I had the man on his feet walking. He said, ‘muchas gracias, señor” – thank you, sir.’ I was very much gracias myself that I had not killed him.”
Dr. Still was delighted at the success of this operation and began at once to study anew the mechanical construction of man. After “a thousand experiments were made with bones,” and he became familiar with the use and structure of every bone in the human system, he again found success in 1882 in Hannibal, Mo.
Miss Hart, who was engaged to be married, had put on her wedding dress and appeared before the mirror to practice her bows and curtseys when she stepped back too far, fell down a stairway, and dislocated her neck. Dr. Still arrived and was asked to set her neck. After doing so, “She could move it in all directions which was proof of a good job,” he said. She then asked if she was well enough to be married and invited him to her wedding, which he attended.
The final incident that brought his new idea together was told before a class in the amphitheater of the A.S.O. in 1901. Dr. Still described how a boy drove up on a mule in great haste from a farm about 25 miles away, and said to come quickly to his mother.
The boy had not been explicit as to the trouble, so as a matter of course the doctor grabbed his obstetrical outfit and took out after him. Arriving at the house, he found a case of pneumonia and no means of going back for medicines because of an ensuing blizzard.
After examining the woman’s chest, he found that his fingers were absent-mindedly following a certain line on her chest, as fingers will in abstraction follow the edge of a table or chair. He gave it his attention and found that he was feeling the lower edge of a rib, which had been dislocated. He set about reducing the dislocation – that at least was something he could do – and he succeeded. Almost immediately the pain was less, and soon left. The fever began to drop and was gone altogether along with her labored respiration within the hour. By morning the woman was back at work hog-cleaning, which was learned to be the cause of her ailment.
In slaughtering hogs, carcasses were hung by the hind legs over the limb of a large tree to be cleaned. One had been finished and was tied out of the way, but it came loose, and in swinging down its snout struck the woman in the chest just under a rib. Although the snoot was soft, it carried the full weight of the animal’s body behind it.
This incident furthered Dr. Still’s thinking about the relation of lesions to disease. “Truth can come from the bottom of a well, or the bottom of hell, and still be truth,” Tucker wrote. “From under the snoot of a hog, and the mantle of a blizzard, and the incoherence of an excited small boy may have come one of the marvelous revelations that ever dawned on human consciousness. But the snoot of a dead hog never turned up an acorn that had a more fruitful growth. Thus from under the snout of a Missouri hog came one of the greatest revelations of our human history – except of course that the right person has to be there to observe and record and make use of it.”
It wasn’t until June 22, 1874, after 19 years of faithful study and experimenting, that Dr. Still said “the full, bright light of his new philosophy seemed to fall suddenly upon him, and he saw and understood for the first time the great law of nature’s remedies. The beautiful system of osteopathy seemed perfectly clear to him, and he then learned the reason of his past successes.”
“He pointed out to me the exact spot in which it suddenly came over him what it all meant – what it was in its entirety, this thing that had been coming to him by piecemeal and growing up in him by degrees, and he said that it was like a terrible blow on the back; a blow that sent him staggering and reeling,” wrote Dr. Tucker.
“A crooked rib; out from under the snout of a hog. But Still ‘pulled that bone’ and out stepped a genie. He straightened a defect, and out stepped a great principle of disease causation. These small clues proved to be the keys that fitted the keyhole to a new world of therapy. That was not yet apparent, at the time, except possibly to the intuitive genius of Still. Nevertheless he hammered it home. A very large truth can come through a very small keyhole.”