Marketplace of the Marvelous (35 page)

But regular medical therapy offered few alternatives, so bonesetters found some success in adjusting deformities that doctors failed to treat. Nineteenth-century British surgeon James Paget suggested that doctors would do well to observe the techniques of the bonesetters, but he stopped far short of endorsing their methods, attributing the bonesetters' success more to luck than actual medical skill.
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Manual manipulation soon fell out of the skill set of regular practitioners. American regulars tended to mirror the attitudes of their European counterparts, and lacking the long medical history of European medicine, the United States never developed a respected practice of manual medicine. From the beginning, American regulars lumped bonesetting together with a whole range of quackish folk practices.
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Everyday Americans did not seem to share their opinion, however. Bonesetters found a place in the United States just as they had in Europe, providing medical care to people who could not afford or did not have access to a regular doctor. Perhaps the most famous American bonesetters were the Sweet family of New England, who ministered to several generations of the sick in Rhode Island, Massachusetts, Connecticut, and New York in the late seventeenth century. Benoni Sweet, believing the skill an innate gift, passed on the practice to his sons. The family gained considerable fame after Benoni's son Job Sweet set the broken or dislocated bones of French officers encamped in Newport, Rhode Island, during the American Revolution. After the war, Job reset the dislocated hip of Vice President Aaron Burr's daughter, Theodosia, an achievement that won him a roster of patients and allowed him to practice bonesetting full-time. His was
the rare case, though, as most bonesetters, including the other Sweets, worked other jobs and set bones on the side.
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Andrew Taylor Still first discovered the benefits of manual manipulation as a child. Born in a log cabin near the Cumberland Gap in Virginia on August 6, 1828, Still was the son of a Methodist minister who dabbled in medicine, the dual minister-physician role so common to early America, particularly on the frontier. One day, suffering from a terrible headache, Still tied a rope about ten inches off the ground between two trees. He wrapped a blanket around the rope as a kind of makeshift pillow, lay on the ground with his neck resting across the blanket-draped rope, and fell asleep. When he woke, the headache was gone. Still did not make much of it at the time, but years later the event took on historic proportions as Still's first lesson in osteopathy.
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Still's family was constantly on the move. Following the line of American settlement, the Stills moved first to Tennessee and then to Missouri and later Kansas as Still's father rode the Methodist circuit and cared for the sick. Inspired by his father to enter medicine, Still studied medical books and opened his own practice in Missouri. In 1854, he joined his father in Kansas in an ill-fated attempt to escape rising tensions over the expansion of slavery in the West. The issue of slavery became unavoidable, though, following Still, an ardent abolitionist, to his new home.
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Working alongside his father, Still found himself growing increasingly frustrated over his inability to heal as he watched patient after patient succumb to disease. Standard medical therapy seemed to inflict more harm on patients than if he simply left them alone. Wondering if there was a better way, Still began digging up Indian graves to study human anatomy. He spent hundreds of hours examining and charting the placement and workings of each of the body's bones. He also experimented with new treatments, including manual manipulation.
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His studies convinced him that “if Samson could slay the Philistines, or at least 3000 of them, with the jaw bone of an ass (one bone), . . . I could with over 200 bones of the human body, enter into combat and slay the greater part of the diseases to which the human race is subject.”
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Unsurprisingly, Still's neighbors found his grave-digging a little strange, and his church eventually excommunicated him for emulating Christ by the laying on of hands.
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Still lost his confidence in medicine completely after the Civil War
when three of his children died in an outbreak of spinal meningitis. Devastated by the loss and the doctor's inability to save them through heroic methods, Still relinquished his faith in drugs and the doctors who administered them, vowing, like Thomson did before him in tragedy, to devote his life to finding a better way to treat disease. Still spent the next decade researching and experimenting. He maintained his medical license and continued to prescribe some drugs, but he turned more and more to various manual techniques for alleviating pain.
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Recalling his childhood experience with headache relief, Still slowly began to conceive of a theory of health based on a normally functioning musculoskeletal system. Undaunted by his excommunication, Still credited God with providing the inspiration for his theory and, thus, saw himself fulfilling a divine mission in working toward a drugless and nonsurgical approach to disease based on touch. Mesmerists, too, believed in the healing power of touch. A century earlier, Mesmer had witnessed the potential of the human spirit to heal as he passed his hands over the bodies of his patients. If there was any idea that would attract a spiritually inclined healer like Still, this was it, and he soon began advertising himself as a magnetic healer. Of course, the combination of magnetism and manual manipulation did little to win Still acceptance from the regular medical community or from many of his patients, who were bewildered by his change of methods. So in 1874, Still moved to Kirksville, Missouri, seeking a fresh start.
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At first, Kirksville proved scarcely kinder to Still's brand of medicine. To win people over, Still became a medical circuit rider, traveling from town to town performing his manipulations on skeptical volunteers and advertising himself as “the Lightening Bone Setter.” His physical appearance likely gave a poor first impression. Tall and bearded, Still often arrived in town with a walking stick in hand, wearing a dowdy felt hat, a wrinkled suit, and baggy pants stuffed into the top of his boots. Flung over one shoulder was a bag of bones. It was a look that fairly shouted convention-flouting loony—or maybe macabre hobo.
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Still claimed that rumors about him in his early days made even children cross to the other side of the street to avoid the man called “an infidel, crank, crazy.”
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But any doubts about Still were soon overcome by his masterful ability to heal the sick.

To many observers, it seemed as though Still could see straight into the body and know just what bone to manipulate. In one town,
Still freed a hard-drinking blacksmith from his taste for liquor by realigning his ribs. In another, Still relieved an Irish woman of nagging shoulder pain and asthma by resetting several ribs and an upper vertebra. As word of Still's miraculous cures spread, people came from great distances to see him. Still's demonstrations became like revivalist camp meetings. He denounced the evils of the regular medical profession and left people shouting in wonder at his startling treatments. In his wake, he left a trail of casts, crutches, and surgical devices no longer needed by patients.
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Even his rumpled appearance became an asset, representing to some admirers his lack of concern with material things. Still soon won over Kirksville and gave up his itinerancy to practice in town. Realizing he needed a more distinctive name for his form of therapy than bonesetting, Still coined the name “osteopathy” from
os
for bone and
pathology
, the study of the cause and effect of disease.
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Still conceived of the human body as an intricate, God-created machine that worked in harmony with nature. “Quit your pills and learn from Osteopathy the principle that governs you,” declared Still. “Learn that you are a machine, your heart an engine, your lungs a fanning machine and a sieve, your brain with its two lobes an electric battery.”
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He rejected drugs as unnecessary and potentially harmful and claimed that their use demonstrated a lack of faith in the powers of nature and “accus[ed] God of incapacity.” Still believed the body was chemically self-sufficient, a human drugstore designed and stocked by God with everything it needed to be healthy and happy. He claimed that his travels had confirmed to him that “all the remedies necessary to health are compounded within the human body.”
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Surely “the Architect of the universe was wise enough to construct man so he could travel from the Maine of birth to the California of the grave unaided by drugs,” asserted Still.
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The doctor's job then was to serve as the body's mechanic, tinkering with the machinery of the body to ensure the proper functioning of God's perfect creation. In Still's scheme, doctors were never directly responsible for the cure but simply acted as intermediaries between the patient's self-healing mechanism and nature.

Still identified blood as the essential ingredient to health. The lubricant that kept the body running, blood ensured the well-being of its tissues and organs. The artery was the “father of the rivers of life, health and ease, and its muddy or impure water is first in all disease,”
wrote Still of a concept that became known as the Law of the Artery.
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Misaligned bones exerted pressure on the blood vessels, diverting and even blocking their life-giving current to the organs and causing disease and deformity.
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He denied the existence of diseases as separate entities, seeing instead a collection of symptoms that pointed to a vascular blockage at a point known as the “osteopathic legion.” These lesions were small abnormalities that threw off the body's whole system and caused patients to feel pain and other symptoms that they mistakenly associated with the disease itself. A similar idea underlay homeopathy, Thomsonism, and humoralism. “There is no such disease as fever—typhus, typhoid, or lung—rheumatism, sciatica, gout, colic, liver disease, nettle rash, or croup on to the end of the list,” wrote Still. “They do not exist as diseases, but separate or combined are only effects.”
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Still believed that the osteopathic lesion could account for all human complaints. Gout, for instance, resulted from lumbar displacements. Still based his conclusion, in part, on the high number of cases he found among merchants who frequently stretched their arms and backs to stock goods on high shelves, wrenching their lower backs out of alignment. Goiters, on the other hand, came from pressure on the blood vessels in the neck from vertebrae, ribs, or the clavicles.
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Blood was not the only cause of lesions; nerves, too, had to remain unobstructed. The nervous system fascinated and awed Still. While he was unsure of exactly what electrical force powered it, he was sure that the brain operated like an “electric battery” on the body. He suggested that the artery takes blood from the heart and deposits it in the cells of the nervous system, which “act to give life, motion and form to organs, muscles, and all parts of the body.”
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So interference with nerve functioning also produced an osteopathic lesion. The blood and nerves worked in close collaboration. The rope swing Still had constructed as a child, he now determined, had cured his headache by putting pressure on the soft tissues in the back of his neck, relaxing the nerves and lessening the dysfunction while giving “harmony to the flow of the arterial blood to and through the veins.”
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While any misplaced bone could cause an obstruction, the spinal column at the center of the nervous system seemed especially liable to lesions given all of the stress, pressure, twists, and falls it endured in the course of daily living. As a result, osteopathic treatment tended to focus on the vertebrae and ribs.
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Still located lesions by touch, but also by taking a standard patient
history. Feeling the body for problems, osteopaths diagnosed the affected organ and deduced the vessels and nerves involved. Still needed no specialized equipment or devices to carry out his manipulations. He pressed patients against chairs, walls, tables, and doorframes.
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Still drew careful and firm distinctions between osteopathy and massage, which many of his critics assumed he practiced. Osteopaths did not knead, rub, or tap patients. They were “physicians,” asserted Still, who adjusted “bone, cartilage, ligament, tendon, muscle, or even . . . the fascia which enfolds all structures.”
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As evidence of the distinction, one only had to read his description of the treatment he gave an old woman suffering from a “crooked neck and a stitch in the muscles.” Still set one foot against the plank of a fence for leverage, while the woman rested against his knee. He placed one hand on her neck and the other on her head. He then gave her head a twist that reportedly corrected the lesion instantly.
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With the lesion removed, the blood and nerve energy could flow freely, and the body recovered its health automatically under the ancient principle of
vis medicatrix naturae
, or the healing power of nature.

Still's original theory of disease was highly speculative, based only nominally in anatomy, but patients did not seem to care. Far more important was that it seemed to work. And trainloads of people flocked to his Kirksville infirmary seeking his help. Unable to treat all of the patients seeking his services, Still decided to open a school to teach others his system. He secured a charter from the state of Missouri and opened the American School of Osteopathy in Kirksville in October of 1892. Twenty-one students enrolled in the first class, six of them women. A state charter allowed Still to grant degrees of medical doctor, or MD, but seeking to visibly demonstrate osteopathy's distance from regular medicine, Still decided to grant his own degree, the DO, or doctor of osteopathy. Students earned the degree by attending two five-month sessions of training in manipulation and anatomy. The addition of Dr. William Smith, a respected Scottish regular doctor trained at the University of Edinburgh, to the faculty as a professor of anatomy lent the school legitimacy and the imprimatur of regular medicine. Because osteopathic methods were difficult to explain in words, Still stressed the importance of observation and hands-on learning.
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Many students recalled afternoons in the infirmary with the “old doctor,” as Still was affectionately known, working on patients. “We would hold the patients in position while Dr. Still
worked upon them, explaining to us as he treated why he gave this movement in one place, and a different movement in another,” wrote Arthur Grant Hildreth years later.
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Still took pride in making his system available to anyone who wanted to learn, including members of the lower classes, who often lacked a formal education and could not afford the tuition. Rather than turn them away, though, Still welcomed them as a way to demonstrate his system's altruism and to spread the word about osteopathy.
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