A.T. Still

The founder of Osteopathy, the American Andrew Taylor Still, (1828–1917) is an extraordinary man who deserves a place alongside the great thinkers and inventors. He spent his childhood in the north-east of Missouri in the Indian territories as the son of a father who was a doctor, pastor, farmer and mechanic. These life circumstances provided him with an enormous cultural, philosophical and practical background that he continued to develop and highlight throughout his life.

Fascinated by the discoveries of time, electricity and the mechanization of the industrial revolution led him to devote 10 years of his life to the development of a number of agricultural machines that we encounter today in our fields. Later in his life, in collaboration with his son, he designed a prototype for a boiler.

Still was always seeking justice and equality for genders, peoples and races, and he advocated, even then, that access to medicine should be a right for everyone. Osteopathy clearly met this criterion because the treatment required neither medication nor specialized equipment. Using the metaphor that the body is God's pharmacy, Still relied on the fact that our body contains all the elements necessary to maintain and restore health.

As a doctor during the Civil War in a military hospital, he designed a perfusion system (Baxter) to create a permanent flow of physiological serum on a large wound to prevent it from becoming infected. A procedure that proved effective.

But above all, Still first introduced the concept of immunity, the body's ability to create resistance against certain pathogens. He was the first to advocate the use of vaccines with the intention of protecting the population (especially the poor and vulnerable who could not afford access to medicine) against the inevitability of recurring diseases.