Andrew Taylor Still, the father of osteopathy, was born on August 6, 1828, in Virginia to Abram and Martha Still. Growing up on the frontier lands of Tennessee and Missouri provided the impetus for his first studies of the musculoskeletal system. Skinning squirrels and deer, Still became familiar with the relationship between bones, muscles, nerves, and veins long before he picked up an anatomy book. He later studied medicine under his doctor-preacher father and served as a Union surgeon during the Civil War.
Following the war, his distrust of traditional medicine grew when three of his children died of cerebrospinal meningitis. Still decided that the medications of his day were useless and that there had to be another way.
Still studied the attributes of good health so he could understand disease. He saw the body as a complex machine that, when working properly, stayed free of disease. He turned to a drugless, manipulative therapy believing disease was caused by a failure of the human machinery to carry the fluids necessary to maintain health. He called his holistic approach osteopathy for the Greek words osteon, meaning bone, and pathos, to suffer.
Still gained a following working as an itinerant healer, and in October 1892, he opened the American School of Osteopathy in Kirksville, Missouri. Still welcomed women even as other medical schools denied them access.
As of 2000, there were 16 osteopathic medicine colleges in the United States and 35,000 practicing doctors of osteopathy. The Kirksville College of Osteopathic Medicine remains open.
