I will conclude this chapter of my boyhood experience with an incident which, simple as it was, may be said to be my first discovery in the science of Osteopathy. Early in life I began to hate drugs.
One day, when about ten years old, I suffered from a headache. I made a swing of my father’s plow-line between two trees; but my head hurt too much to make swinging comfortable, so I let the rope down to about eight or ten inches of the ground, threw the end of a blanket on it, and I lay down on the ground and used the rope for a swinging pillow. Thus I lay stretched on my back, with my neck across the rope. Soon I became easy and went to sleep, got up in a little while with headache all gone. As I knew nothing of anatomy, I took no thought of how a rope could stop headache and the sick stomach which accompanied it. After that discovery I roped my neck whenever I felt those spells coming on. I followed that treatment for twenty years before the wedge of reason reached my brain, and I could see that I had suspended the action of the great occipital nerves, and given harmony to the flow of the arterial blood to and through the veins, and ease was the effect, as the reader can see. I have worked from the days of a child, for more than fifty years, to obtain a more thorough knowledge of the workings of the machinery of life, to produce ease and health. And today I am, as I have been for fifty years, fully established in the belief that the artery is the father of the rivers of life, health, and ease, and its muddy or impure water is first in all disease.
Reference: Still, A.T. (1908). The Autobiography of A.T. Still (pp. 31-33).
