A Brief History

Andrew Taylor Still was born on the 6 August 1828 in Virginia, interested in machinery and nature from a young age, and at the age of ten suffering from a headache assembled a swinging rope between two trees a few inches off the ground to use as a support for his head and fell asleep, found that once he had awoken his headache was gone.

Later through serving an apprenticeship in medicine, with his father a Methodist Preacher, and with an avid interest in anatomy he was able to discover how his 'treatment' had affected his body tissues, '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...I have worked from the days of a child...to obtain a more thorough knowledge of the workings of the machinery of life, in producing ease and health.'

Still went on to describe the new science he had discovered, 'I had worked and tried to reason that a body that was perfectly normal in structure could keep a man in the full enjoyment of health just as long as the body was perfectly normal. On that conclusion I worked, first, to know what was normal in form and what was not normal; then I compared the two in disease and health. I found by hard study and experimenting that no human body was normal in bone form whilst harboring any disease, either acute or chronic. I got good results in adjusting these bodies to such a degree that people began to ask what I was going to call my new science.

I wanted to call my new science Osteopathy..'

The British School of Osteopathy was founded in 1917 by John Martin Littlejohn, a patient, student and colleague of Andrew Taylor Still, who took the understanding of physiology to further develop the practice of Osteopathic technique for treatment to coordinate body tissues for corrective healthcare.

Having studied under Littlejohn, John Wernham and T. E. Hall founded The Maidstone Osteopathic Clinic in 1951; which later became the John Wernham College of Classical Osteopathy. Now in the modern day The Institute of Classical Osteopathy continues to teach in the style of the early Osteopaths, maintaining the high standards of  technical science and art of the profession with their Classical post graduate courses.

Definition Of Osteopathy

"Osteopathy is that science or system of healing which emphasizes, (a) the diagnosis of diseases by physical methods with a view to discovering, not the symptoms but the causes of disease, in connection with misplacement of tissue, obstruction of the fluids and interference with the forces of the organism; (b) the treatment of diseases by scientific manipulations in connection with which the operating physician mechanically uses and applies the inherent resources of the organism to overcome disease and establish health, either by removing or correcting mechanical disorders and thus permitting nature to recuperate the diseased part, or by producing and establishing anti-toxic and anti-septic conditions to counteract toxic and septic conditions of the organism or its parts: (c) the application of mechanical and operative surgery in setting fractured or dislocated bones, repairing lacerations and removing abnormal tissue growths or tissue elements when these become dangerous to the organic life."

Copyrighted 1900 by J.M. Littlejohn D.O.