This A.T. Still Biography is Fascinating!

Thanks to Dr. Jeff Jones for loaning me his copy, complete with an inscription by the author and from former student Crystal Dockery. Many Enid residents will remember Dr. Dockery who attended the Family Medicine Residency Program here in Enid.From the book’s jacket: “Andrew Taylor Still had been a medical doctor for ten years when a devastating personal tragedy convinced him to stop prescribing the crude drugs of his day and seek a more effective method of practicing medicine. Believing there must be a better way of healing the sick than introducing toxic substances into the body, he embarked on a lifelong quest to decipher the riddles of health and disease, life and death. Combining the latest scientific knowledge with the revolutionary intuition that the body innately contains all the remedies needed for curing, he developed a drugless method of healing effective across the whole disease spectrum.This is the inspirational story of a visionary, nonconformist scientist, ‘the man who saw the truth, who had the mind to conceive it, the indomitable will and courage to put it over in the face of bitter opposition, poverty and social ostracism, and an abiding faith in its ultimate triumph.’”The story of how this book came to be is equally interesting. John Lewis was born in England and worked for the family’s woolen manufacturing business until it ceased operation in the 1980s.For a while, he was a track and field athlete and then became a certified masseur. During his time as a masseur at what he calls “an old-fashioned health farm in Surrey” he met osteopath David Cook, who treated the guests one day a week. Lewis took a few treatments, experienced his first session of cranial osteopathy, and decided he wanted to become an osteopathic physician himself.He entered the British School of Osteopathy in 1991. During his first year, he read Dr Still’s Autobiography and was struck both by the wisdom contained in his words. In 1997,two years after graduating, Lewis traveled to the United States to begin the research that eventually culminated, fifteen years later, in his book.If you’d like to know more about A.T. Still - physician, Civil War surgeon, author, inventor, college founder, Kansas territorial and state legislator who invented osteopathic medicine, head over to the book’s website and order yourself a copy. www.atstill.com