In 1892, Andrew Taylor Still opened the world's first school of osteopathy in a small frame cottage in Kirksville, Missouri. Still slowly developed his position on medicine and the medical speciality that would take over his life, and become his lifes work.
As a child he would skin squirrels, as all youth did in the middle 1800s, as a chore to provide food for the family. But, different from other young boys, he would study the musculoskeletal system, as curiosity drove him to first hand look at the bones, muscles, nerves and veins. A little older, he studied medicine under his doctor-preacher father and served as a Union surgeon during the Civil War. During this time, Andrew Still became increasingly dissatisfied with the use of medicine to treat illnesses. A few years after the war, meningitis killed three of his children, and he decided drugs were inefficient and that an alternative treatment was needed.
Andrew Taylor Still came to view the body as a complex machine that, when working properly, stayed free of disease and dysfunction. He believed disease was caused by a failure of the human machinery to properly carry the fluids necessary to maintain health. Still split from his medical counterparts and turned to a drugless, manipulative therapy designed to release the body's healing powers. He called his new science for the greek words osteon, meaning bone, and pathos, meaning to suffer.
In 1887, Andrew Still settled in Kirksville, Missouri to treat patients. His caseload became so heavy he decided to open an infirmary/school to treat patients and pass on his knowledge. The American School of Osteopathy opened in the fall of 1892. Except for anatomy, taught each morning using a textbook and a skeleton, course work during the first year was informal. Students spent most of their time in the treatment rooms helping Still and his assistants. At the end of the year, Still decided to close the school, believing he had failed -- that he was not producing true osteopaths who understood the human body.
Persuaded to continue, he tightened admission standards to bring credibility to the field and revised the course work, requiring a grade of 90% in anatomy. It was rumored then, and is to this day, that he also acquired fresh course materials from from a nearby source, the city cemetery which bordered his property.
In 1895 a new infirmary opened, and within a year, two additions were begun. By 1896 the school offered courses in diagnosis, surgery, obstretrics, and anatomy --taught with practical demonstrations in the infirmary's amphitheatre. The little school was on its way to becoming a full fledged college with a solid medical curriculum.
Doctor George Still, grandnephew of Andrew Taylor Still, was the school's premier surgeon and president of the college (1919-1922).
Today, Andrew Still's little school, is called the Kirksville College of Osteopathic Medicine is not only among the best in it field in the country, but is a college on a 65 acre campus.
[some material in this comment came from an essay by Lisa Frick.]