Harrisburg telegraph. [volume] (Harrisburg, Pa.) 1879-1948, 1917-12-18
DIR. STILL'SDEATH
IS A GREAT LOSS
TO OSTEOPATHY
A Harrisburg Practitioner
Pays Tribute to Founder
of Drugless Healing

Practitioners and patrons of oste-
opathy in Harrisburg and all over
the country feel that in the death
last week of DR.. Andrew Taylor Still
America has lost one of its really
great offsprings, a man who meas
ured to the standard of a Lincoln.
Indeed the story of his childhood,
his frontier life, his struggles to es-
tablish osteopathy against powerful
antagonism and his final success
reads not unlike that of the great
Emancipator.
Among the osteopath physicians of
this city who studied the profession
under DR.. Still is DR.. II. M. Vastine,
109 Locust street. He describes the
founder of osteopathy as big, pow
erful man, SO careless of his personal
appearance that he never wore
necktie, whose deep set reflective eye
seemed to see to the ends of the
earth.
Il have frequently heard him tell
what first started him thinking that
the system of drugs and curative
agents was all wrong" related DIR.
Vastine. He was then about ten
years old and had been suffering
with headaches. One day he made a
swing of his fathers plow line be-
tween two trees. But his head hurt
too much to make it comfortable, so
he let the rope down eight or ten
inches off the ground and used it for
a swinging pillow. Thus he lay
stretched out on his back and his
neck across the rope. Very shortly
he became easy and went to sleep
and when he awoke the headache
was gone. After that for twenty
years he 'roped' his neck when his
head hurt. always probing for the
cause. He could see that he sus-
pended action of the great occipital
nerves and gave harmony to the
flow of the arterial blood to and
through the veins, and ease was the
effect"
DR.. Stills father was a Methodist
missionary who moved from Vir-
ginia to Kansas in the early days
where he worked among the Shaw
nee Indians. The enterpriSing young
son, after he had a medical educa-
ton, used to tell how he dug up
Indian skeletons by the hundreds
and it was thus that he became such
a wonderful anatomist Asked what
osteopathy is he was accustomed to
reply, 1T is anatomy first, last and
all the time"
While DR.. Still was surgeon scout
with General John c. Fremont, and
later when he served in the Twen-
ty-first Kansas Militia in the Civil
War he convinced himself little by
little that the idea of drugs was all
wrong and in 1874 he was prepared
to declare that q disturbed artery
worked the beginning, to an hour
and q minute, when disease begins
to SOW the seeds of destruction in the
10 hn D1l h
stances that enter the body which
are not foods are poisons. In his
search for Il basic foundation upon
which to build his philosophy he ap-
propriated the fundamental law of
cause and effect, and assumed that
disease was an effect only. That
the causes were largely intra-phySi-
cal. within the body mechanism it.
self THE integrity of the structure
determines the integrity of the func-
tion," he declared. Man is a self
oiling, ,self-regulating, Self-repara-
tive, animated machine. Given prop
er air, food and water, the machine
will function perfectly, so long as
the parts are maintained in perfect
alignment. When order in all parts
is found. disease cannot prevail"
1t required years of struggle and
most of the time struggle with
poverty before DR.. Still could awaken
lie was never one to value money;
only sought the truth and an oppor-
tunity to help his fellow man. He
believed in surgery, although he
thought it was sometimes practiced
when osteopathy could be used. In
the end he was enabled to establish
the now flouriShing college at Kinks
Vile, Mo-, and scattered over the
country are other colleges with
many hospitals and sanatoriumS.
DIR. Still was famous for his cpl
grams and original maxims which
came to him with no effort of think
ing apparently, but which really
were the result of profound thought
Here are a few:
Life is the force sent forth by
Deity to Vivify all nature"
The medical world disguises it's
inability to cure by talk. talk, talk"
Il fought this fight for God when
he didn't have a friend on earth but
Sam Jones and me-"
"All medical writings fight ef-
fects, not cause"
"A lesion precedes and produces
the effect known as disease. This iS
the soul and body of osteopathy as a
healing art.
THE great Inventor of the Uni
verse by the union of mind and mat
ter has constructed the most Won
derful of all machines, man, and
osteopathy demonstrates fully that
he is capable of running without the
aid of whisky, drugs or kindred
poisons."
Cures Colds The World Over