H I S TO R Y
DISCOVER EUDORA
story by cindy higgins
The Legacy of the Lightning Bonesetter Osteopathy founder Andrew T. Still had his breakthrough in Eudora.
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braham Still Park, located at 725 East 14th Street, is named for a Methodist missionary family, one of the first groups to settle in the Eudora area. Today, the Stills are also celebrated for their advancement of medical science—though their history isn’t without its unpleasant moments. The first of the family to come to Eudora was minister Abraham Still. In 1850, he took charge of the Wakarusa Mission, a boarding school with a 100-acre farm, which was previously run by minister Thomas Markham. Abraham’s wife, Martha, joined him a year later with their children. The Still family taught children from various local tribes at the school, which was located on what is now the west side of Elm Street, between 12th and 13th streets. Each class consisted of about 40 children. Beyond being a minister and a farmer, Abraham also treated physical ailments. Similar to other self-acclaimed healers of the time, he believed extracting toxins from the body with laxatives would restore a patient’s health. He often prescribed calomel, a popular “cure” that contained mercury. Abraham dosed his 14-year-old son Andrew with so much calomel that his teeth fell out, a common side effect of excessive use. Six of the Stills’ nine children also went into the medical field, including Andrew, who joined Abraham at the Wakarusa Mission to farm and practice medicine in 1853. However, Andrew grew dissatisfied with ineffective treatments that addressed only the symptoms of each patient—he resolved to find the underlying causes of these ailments. He theorized that most health conditions were caused by the interactions between bones, muscles, nerves, and organs. To learn more about anatomy, Andrew removed recently buried bodies from graves around Eudora in the dark of the night to study the corpses. “I became a robber in the name of science. Yes, I grew to be one of those vultures of the scalpel,” he writes in his first book, Autobiography of Andrew T. Still with a History of the Discovery and Development of the Science of Osteopathy. Andrew was particularly fascinated by victims of cholera, a water-borne disease that killed many in the early days of Kansas settlement.
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cityofeudoraks.gov
Osteopathy founder Andrew T. Still moved to Kirksville, Missouri, after developing his theory of medicine in Eudora. Photograph courtesy of Museum of Osteopathic Medicine.
SPRING/SUMMER 2020
