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THE MISSOURI MECCA H aving named his new system of medicine, Still decided it was time to share his discovery with others. In 1892 he opened the American School of Osteopathy, charging his students $500 for several months of personal instruction. Upon completion of the specified course, students were awarded a certificate stating they were “diplomats in osteopathy,” or DOs. Within six years, the school changed the title on the certificate and bestowed on new graduates the degree Doctor of Osteopathy . A few months before his first classes were to begin, Still had the good fortune to meet Dr. William Smith (1862–1912), a thirty-year-old Scottish physician who was in town on a business trip. Smith had been trained at Edinburgh and had studied for several additional years on the Continent ; his background was in stark contrast to that of the self-taught country doctor.1 After hearing Still spoken of as the “d——d quack” by a local regular physician, he decided to investigate osteopathy on his own. “I sat entranced,” Smith wrote a few years later of his first encounter with Still. “The theories he introduced were so novel, so contrary to all I had read or heard that I failed to follow his reasoning. Arguments as to their impossibility were simply met with one statement: ‘But it is so; there are no “ifs” and “ands” about it, I do what I tell you and the people get well.’”2 After visiting several boarding houses around town and seeing the results that had been obtained under such care, Smith became convinced that something of value was being imparted. As he wanted to learn more, Smith accepted Still’s offer to teach him everything he knew; in return, the young doctor would serve as an instructor in Still’s proposed school. On October 3, 1892, classes began, with upwards of twenty-one students , men and women, enrolling at the beginning or during the first sev000 THE 2 IN AMERICA THE MISSOURI MECCA 23 eral weeks of the course. The ages of the students ranged from eighteen to sixty-five. Some held college degrees, others had nothing more than a common school education. All of them, however, had been direct or indirect beneficiaries of Still’s ministrations. Each morning for four months Smith drilled the group in anatomy without the benefit of a cadaver upon which to demonstrate. This problem was compensated for in part by his lecturing, which, according to one of his students, “was of such an impressionable type that one who listened to him could virtually look into the human body with his mind’s eye and see all its numerous functions.”3 Smith’s role was also symbolic. As one early student shrewdly noted, “‘Bill’ furnished the ‘front.’ He ‘looked good’ to the people and inspired confidence in infant osteopathy.”4 Following their daily anatomy lessons, students spent the afternoons in the infirmary with the “old doctor,” as he was affectionately called. Still was a natural philosopher rather than an academician. Students had to pick up what knowledge they could by listening to his extended metaphors and his sometimes rambling commentary. One of his followers declared: He rose to the lofty heights of his conceptions of life, health, disease and medicine by the purest of intuition. He wiped the slate of knowledge, as it were, of much if not most of the accepted, accredited teachings of the day, not only in the field of medicine, but also in science, religion, ethics, politics, and endeavored to begin his thinking upon any and every subject with the new data of pure forms, built out of his imagination, with little regard or discomfort if his excursions took him sheer in the face of every accepted belief and profession.5 “The human body,” Still told his students, “is a machine run by the unseen force called life, and that it may be run harmoniously it is necessary that there be liberty of blood, nerves, and arteries from their generating point to their destination.” He then illustrated the significance of this basic principle with a colorful analogy: Suppose in far distant California there is a colony of people depending upon your coming in person with a load of produce to keep them from starving. You load your car with everything necessary to sustain life and start off in the right direction. So far so good. But in case you are side-tracked some where, and so long delayed in...

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