The Legacy of the Lightning Bonesetter

Abraham 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.

Osteopathy founder Andrew T. Still moved to Kirksville, Missouri, after developing his theory of medicine in Eudora. Photograph courtesy of Museum of Osteopathic Medicine.

He determined that many conditions could be cured by manipulating the alignment of a patient’s bones. Few of his peers accepted this medical philosophy; in a time of unqualified physicians, Andrew was considered a sacrilegious quack. His brother James, who practiced medicine for 30 years from his home at 806 Main Street, openly questioned Andrew’s sanity.

Shunned in Douglas County for his grave robbing and unorthodox medical views, Andrew moved to Kirksville, Missouri, in 1873 to be a “lightning bonesetter,” a title of his own invention.

Twenty years later, he founded a medical school there. Graduating in the school’s first class were Andrew’s brothers, James and Thomas, who had converted to Andrew’s medical philosophy when they learned of his newfound financial success. At the school, students learned osteopathy, a term Andrew created from the Greek words osteon (bone) and pathos (suffering).

Despite its dubious beginnings, modern osteopathy embraces Still’s philosophy of preventative care, treatment of the whole person, and use of osteopathic manipulative medicine to relieve pain and to diagnose and treat disease. His school, now known as A.T. Still University, continues to operate today in Kirksville and Mesa, Arizona.

When explaining the difference between physicians’ credentials, Vicki Whitaker, executive director of the Kansas Association of Osteopathic Medicine, says, “A doctor of osteopathic medicine has the same admitting, prescription, and surgery privileges as a doctor of medicine, but they treat the whole patient—mind, body, spirit—while MDs treat diseases.”

Today, 1 out of every 4 medical students is enrolled in an osteopathic medical school, according to the American Osteopathic Association. Upon graduation, these fully licensed physicians practice in many different areas of medicine and incorporate a treatment philosophy that started on Elm Street right here in Eudora.

• Andrew Still, 1828–1917 by Carol Trowbridge

• A Systematic Treatise, Historical, Etiological and Practical, on the Principal Diseases of the Interior Valley of North America by Daniel Drake

• A System of Surgery: Pathological, Diagnostic, Therapeutic, and Operative by Samuel McGross

• Autobiography of Andrew T. Still with a History of the Discovery and Development of the Science of Osteopathy by Andrew Taylor Still

• Frontier Doctor, Medical Pioneer: The Life and Times of A.T. Still and His Family by Charles E. Still, Jr.

• History of Osteopathy (and TwentiethCentury Medical Practice) by E.R. Booth.

• The Feminine Touch: Women in Osteopathic Medicine by Thomas Quinn

• The Reformed Practice of Medicine: Based Upon the Principles of the Chrono-Thermal System Practiced by the Celebrated Dr. Dickson of London by Jacob Servoss Rose

• Two Centuries of American Medicine, 1776–1976 by James Bordley III and A. McGehee Harvey

cityofeudoraks.gov

Top: James and Andrew Still. Photograph courtesy of Museum of Osteopathic Medicine. Above: The Still family is remembered today at Abraham Still Park in Eudora.

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