Museum of Osteopathic Medicine

Andrew Taylor Still was a frontier doctor who lost faith in his own medicine. Born in a Virginia log cabin on August 6, 1828, he was the son of a Methodist circuit rider and physician whose antislavery sermons helped get him reassigned out of Missouri. Andrew fought on the free-state side in Kansas and served in Kansas units in the Civil War. In 1864 spinal meningitis killed two of his children and an adopted child, and a month later a baby daughter died of pneumonia. Unable to save his family with the bleeding, blistering and purging of the day, he turned to anatomy and came to believe that most illness could be treated without drugs by correcting the body's structure.

Shunned in Kansas and then in Macon, he opened an office on the Kirksville square in March 1875, advertising himself as a magnetic healer and lightning bonesetter. He named his system osteopathy in 1885, and in 1892 founded the American School of Osteopathy in a two-room frame building. Its first class, sixteen men and five women, graduated in 1894. Within a few years more than 400 patients a day were in town for treatment, and the Wabash ran four passenger trains daily to carry them.

That first school building and a Still family cabin built in Lee County, Virginia, in the 1820s stand inside the museum's Heritage Hall, moved there in 1994. The museum, founded in 1934, holds more than 100,000 objects, and one gallery traces the history of anatomy, dissection and body snatching.