Osteopathy’s roots lie in post Civil War American medicine.  The founder, Dr. Andrew Taylor Still, served as a physician in the Union Army.  Like today, necessity required innovation, and medicine advanced rapidly to treat the large numbers of sick and wounded.  Dr. Still both benefited and excelled in this innovative thinking and training. Nonetheless, no effective treatments for infection existed at the time, and an epidemic decimated the young physician’s family.  He, and other’s who followed him into the profession felt that addressing only disease was an unbalanced and partial solution, and he laboriously investigated the bodies’ ability to heal itself. Since then, generations of like-minded physicians have developed techniques to diagnose and treat a variety of maladies that are only partially benefited by allopathic medicine.