DR. ANDREW TAYLOR STILL.

(1828 – 1917) Craniosacral therapy, or CST as it is sometimes called, has its roots back in the nineteenth century. A physician called Andrew Taylor Still came up with a revolutionary way of treating illness and disease. He was born in Jonesboro, Lee County in Virginia on 6th August 1828, the son of a physician and Methodist minister. He decided, early on, to follow in his fathers footsteps as a physician. After studying medicine and serving an apprenticeship under his father, he became a licensed MD in the state of Missouri. He served as a doctor in the Union Army during the American civil war, 1861-1865, where he experienced first hand the horrors and suffering of war.

Following the death of three of his children in 1864, from spinal meningitis, and shortly afterwards the death of his wife in child-birth, Still concluded that the orthodox medicinal practices of his day were frequently ineffective and sometimes harmful.  The practise of bleeding the body, prescribing medicines that included arsenic, mercury and addictive narcotics, and frequent amputations were standard treatments of that time. He devoted the rest of his life to studying the human body to find more effective ways to treat disease. His clinical research and observations led him to believe that the musculoskeletal system played a vital role in keeping the body healthy. He believed that the body contained everything required to maintain good health, if properly treated.

He devised a system of manipulation of the spinal bones, that he would later call osteopathy, to correct misalignments or dislocations which he named “subluxations”. He saw these subluxations as barriers, or blocks, to the innate healing ability of the body, and by removing them, the body would heal most things itself. The action of correcting the subluxations freed up nerve impulses that had become trapped either by injury or illness. It also had the benefit of improving blood and lymph flow.

He also instigated preventative medicine, believing that physicians should treat the whole person rather than focusing on disease. Dr Still’s approach was founded on four basic tenets   ( 1) The body functions as a total biologic unit.  (2) The body possesses self-healing and self-regulatory mechanisms.  (3) Structure and function are interrelated.  (4) Abnormal pressure in one part of the body will produce abnormal pressures and strains in other body parts. He considered drugs to be harmful and used only manual therapy to achieve his remarkable success. He was the first to advocate treating the patient as a whole person and not a disease entity; believing that a person cannot be ill in one area of the body without having other areas affected.

However his former medical peers thought the prevailing system worked well and could not understand why he had rejected it. They poured scorn on his methods which used only manual techniques The religious community were also becoming quite outspoken in their condemnation of his healing with his hands, thinking it sacrilegious, and in at least one incident, the religious community said he obtained his remarkable results through the works of the Devil.
He had to move location on several occasions because he was vilified by the medical and religious fraternities. Even his own brothers, also physicians, proclaimed him to be insane. When he moved to Kirksville Missouri, he was able to restore to full health the daughter of the local Minister, and thereafter gained wide acceptance as a physician and teacher.

As his fame spread, his patients came from further afield, boosting the business of the inn keepers and boarding houses. Kirksville embraced the Still family, a new experience for them. Through observation and practice his methods became increasingly successful and he built up a following of patients, and doctors wanting to learn his methodology. His success was such that he could not cope with the large numbers of people wanting treatment.

The first class in Osteopathy in 1892

In 1892 he founded The American School of Osteopathy in Kirksville Missouri, later known as the Kirksville College of Osteopathic Medicine, and today as A T Still University.
The first graduating class included five women, unheard of at that time, and sixteen men, three of whom were Still’s own children.

He had fought all his life as an osteopath to keep drugs out of osteopathy, but shortly after he died in 1917, drugs were introduced and within a few years osteopaths were required to take the same exams as medical doctors. Osteopathy as practised in America has changed radically from what Dr Still taught, but in Europe it is closer to Still’s original teaching.

DR. WILLIAM GARNER SUTHERLAND. (1873-1954)
Sutherland graduated from The American College of Osteopathy in 1900 with honours. He was then twenty-seven years old. Osteopathy was not his first calling. He was born on 27th March 1873, the second of four children of Robert and Dorinda Sutherland. Robert worked as a blacksmith and lumberjack. By the age of fourteen William had already left school to help with the family finances. He went to work in the local newspaper, “The Blunt Advertiser”. When, shortly afterwards, the publisher left to join another newspaper he wanted William to go with him. Several other moves followed until in 1895 he went to Austin in Minnesota, to The Austin Daily Herald. It was here that he first heard about Dr Still and his new cure, Osteopathy.
William’s younger brother, Guy, suffered a health problem from which he recovered after receiving osteopathic treatment. William was hooked. In 1898 he enrolled in the, then, two year course in Osteopathy. While still a student he was examining the bones of a disarticulated skull and noted the bevelled edges to the sphenoid bones, when the thought “bevelled like the gills of a fish, to allow for respiration” first struck him. Although he dismissed the thought, it would continue to recur until he felt compelled to investigate it further.

After graduating, Dr Sutherland, as he now was, opened his office in a room of his parent’s house, and quickly built up a successful practise. Soon he was able to rent his own office. In 1907 Sutherland became president of the Minnesota State Osteopathic Association. He started to lecture on health issues, some of which were published. In the meantime he continued to study the cranium. However, it was not until 1924 that Sutherland started to set about gaining some proof for his theory. He had married for the second time and on his honeymoon he had attended the annual conference of The American Osteopathic Association. Perhaps it was this that inspired him to start buying equipment he would need for his experiments.

At that time , William, like all other British and American physicians , was taught that the joints in bones of the skull became fused together in adolescence and, therefore, incapable of movement from that time forward. Physicians trained in Mainland Europe were taught that cranial bone movement continued throughtout life.  William’s examination of the twenty-two bones that make up the human skull convinced him that they were designed to accommodate movement. And as he believed that nature never did anything without a reason, he determined to test the theory he had been taught. He needed first hand experience, so who better to experiment on than himself.

He devised a helmet which was capable of restricting individual cranial bones. He reasoned that if they were already restricted by fusion, he should feel no difference, so he started a series of experiments on himself. He carried with him a notebook to record any possible symptoms. He also engaged the services of his wife to note any changes in temperament that might escape his attention.

In his first experiment he nearly lost consciousness and released the pressure. Immediately he felt warmth and fluid movement along his spine and also movement in the sacrum, the big triangular bone at the base of the spine. He repeated the experiment several times with the same result. This supported the conclusion that, not only did the cranial bones move, but the sacrum also through the connecting membranes.  He continued with his experiments and with clinical practise based on them and was able to achieve considerable clinical success with his patients.

He extended his research to children and particularly to new born babies and the restrictions that were imposed by the birthing process. He continued to write and talk about his cranial concept over the following years but there appeared to be little interest shown by the orthodox profession.   In 1939 Sutherland published his only written work, apart from his articles in various journals, which he called The Cranial Bowl.  This was a relatively small volume designed to attract the interest of the practitioners of orthodox medicine rather than a textbook explaining his methods.

In the 1940’s, The American School of Osteopathy started a course called Osteopathy in the cranial field, directed by Dr Sutherland. The clinical success he was having by treating the cranial bones was at last attracting the attention of some member of the orthodox medical profession, who wanted to learn his methods. As the popularity of the course grew, Dr Sutherland had to train more teachers to cope with the demand. Among the first of these were: Viola Fryman, Rollin Becker, Anne Wales, Howard lippincot and many more that went on to promote and teach Sutherland’s work.

.DR. HAROLD IVES MAGOUN Snr. (1898 – 1981)
Magoun was one of the first students taught by Sutherland, and did much to promote and teach cranial osteopathy. He is remembered especially for writing “Osteopathy in the Cranial Field”, considered to be the “Bible” of Sutherland’s methods. Published first in 1951, while Sutherland was still alive, it set out in a clear way Sutherlands thoughts, with the objective of attracting more orthodox osteopaths to this field. It is still a textbook of The American Cranial Academy and The Sutherland Teaching Foundation.

DR. JOHN E. UPLEDGER (1932 – )
Dr Upledger, a doctor of orthodox osteopathy, was assisting in an operation to remove a calcified plaque from the membrane that surrounds the spinal cord of one of his patients. His task was to hold the spinal cord still with two pairs of forceps while the surgeon scraped away the plaque. However, to his increasing embarrassment, in spite of his best efforts the part kept moving. The slightest slip by the surgeon could end up with the patient being paralysed from the neck down. The membrane kept moving in a regular cyclical motion throughout the procedure. Nobody could explain the motion, and he could find no reference to it in any of the standard text books. But the story did not end there. Dr Upledger was determined to find the answer, and he did after some years.

In 1968 John attended a course at The Cranial Academy which was being taught by Dr Magoun. Here he learned to feel the motion of the cranial bones, and the sacrum through the connection of the dural membranes. He realized that this was the movement he had first encountered when he was trying to hold the spinal cord steady for the surgeon. Attending the Cranial Academy changed the course of his life. At that time he had contact with Anne Wales, who, with Harold Magoun, was taught by Sutherland. They, and others, taught John to fine tune his palpatory skills and to trust what his hands were telling him.

In the period 1975 – 1983 John was a research fellow at the Faculty of Osteopathic Medicine at Michigan State University. In addition to being a doctor of osteopathy he was also a professor of biomechanics. He was asked by MSU to head a team to “prove or disprove that the cranial bones were capable of movement in adults” There was still controversy about cranial bone movement in the medical community.

The team consisted of Anatomists, Physiologists, Biophysicists and Bioengineers. The result of their work largely confirmed what Sutherland had discovered by experimenting on himself, and in his clinical experience. That the cranial bones, the membranes attaching to them, the membranes surrounding the spinal cord, and the sacrum, together with cerebrospinal fluid make up a moving body system known as the Craniosacral System. By correcting malfunctions in this system, many poorly understood conditions of the brain and spinal cord could be successfully treated.

While at MSU, and in private practice John continued to develop new ways to use the craniosacral system to solve health problems that did not respond to conventional methodologies.  One of his research projects was with autistic children. He found that in examining their cranial membranes that they were, without exception, much tighter than in other healthy children.  He developed strategies to relax the membranes which would bring about a change in the self destructive behaviour and improve emotional response from the patients.
He also came to understand that emotional issues could be locked or recorded in the soft tissue of the body, bringing about physical symptoms. These emotions were negative, or destructive, and could originate from physical, psychological or emotional trauma, or any combination thereof. He developed a system for locating and releasing these impediments to healing, which he called Somato-Emotional Release.

When Dr Upledger left MSU he set up a teaching foundation, The Upledger Institute, to train non-medical health professionals in “CranioSacral Therapy”, a term he coined to differentiate it from what was previously taught to only osteopaths. He has written and lectured extensively on craniosacral therapy, making it available to the general public. He has a gift for making complicated subjects easy to understand. Now well into his seventies, he still maintains an interest in research to improve and extend the scope of his life’s work. To date some 100,000 individuals world-wide have received training from The Upledger Institute.

There are many others who are continuing to develop craniosacral therapy, and have published books on the subject, among them are, Hugh Milne The Heart of Listening, and Franklyn Sills Craniosacral Biodynamics.