• Address on Sixty-Ninth Birthday
• Tribute to a Little Anatomist
• Parents' Duty
• When Still Was Off
• A Warrior from Birth
• Who Discovered Osteopathy?
• Clairvoyant and Clairaudient
• Born to Know Something of Drugs
• The Fight to Preserve Health
• Mathematical Fits
• Climatic Effect on the Lungs
• Diet
• Consternation
• Why I Love God

    We have met here on this birthday occasion, which is also the anniversary of three or four other important events.  Three years ago today the first shovelful of dirt was removed from the southeast corner of the center of this building.  When marked out, the stakes were seventy or eighty feet apart.  The people looked at me and said: "Is Still going to put up that large a building?  What is the matter with him?  We always heard he was a little off -- we know he is off now."  A year ago
last May he was off again by building the north and south additions, and there is no telling what day he will be off again.

    Thirty-five years ago this day, the blood of brothers was spilled in this city by the cannon, sword, and cold lead.  Sixty-nine years ago a great question was before the thinking people of the State of Virginia.  They said there was something strange appeared about three miles west of Jonesboro.  The wise men of the East and the women of the West were called together.  They said, "What is it?" They studied a minute; an old lady said, " P-p-perhaps it is a baby."  As near as I can remember I was a warrior at that time, and I told them so in plain English in less than one hour.  My mother said I could come as near saying "war" (wab) as any child she ever saw when I was an hour old.  I could say it with a kind of a Southern twang, and it has been war ever since for some cause.

    Now you are interested in this great question of Osteopathy.  When a preacher gets up, be takes a text; then he preaches to it and from it, just as he can.  If I take my text, I expect I will preach a good ways from it.  My text is this: Who discovered Osteopathy?  Twenty-four years ago, the 22d day of next June, at ten o'clock, I saw a small light in the horizon of truth.  It was put in my hand, as I understood it, by the God of nature.  That light bore on its face the inscription: "This is My medical library, surgery, and obstetrics.  This is My book with all directions, instructions, doses, sizes, and quantities to be used in all cases of sickness, and birth, the beginning of man; in childhood, youth, and declining days." I am something of what people call "inspired." We Methodists call it "intuitive." The other classes have different names for it -- clairvoyant and clairaudient.  Sometimes I was so clairvoyant that I could see my father twenty miles from home: I could see him very plainly cutting a switch for my brother Jim and I, if we hadn't done a good day's work.  That is called clairvoyance.  Then I could hear him say: "If you don't plow faster I will tan you twice a week." That is clairaudience.

    I was born to know something of drugs.  I knew they tasted nasty; I knew they made me sick, and very sick; I knew I didn't like them.  I grew up with the question, as soon as I was old enough to reason at all, whether or not God justified by any means whatever the idea that a man should be released from one poison by the use of another.  That if the season should be cold, hot, wet, or dry, and you should become sick, which makes poisons in the blood, stagnation, making a new matter in it, which strikes the vital forces, and there causes a contention.  Vitality is all the while trying to check and throw off all impurities, and keeps the body in a continual fight.  Fight for what?  To maintain its ground as a healthy body.  I commenced the hunt when but a child, and kept it up until I was forty years old.  I could see the action of electricity; I could see it give out lights in the heavens when there was no blacksmith up there to hammer out the sparks. I could see the stars flying across the heavens in 1834 -- firecrackers in heaven.  How is that firecracker work done?  Is there any firecracker work going on in the human blood?  Where is your battery?  What is the matter with your battery when you have fever?  What is fever?  Oh, the eminent authors say it is a peculiar increase of temperature, causes unknown.  As we don't know them, we will give them a name so we will know what to call them.  We will name them typhus, typhoid, malarial, etc., according to the seasons of the year.  We name them according to something.  They have a system of naming them; we call it symptomatology.  It is a species of anatomy when you study it.  You put the parts all together, and you have made a something, and that is croup.  You put in some variations, and it is called fever.  Subtract something, and put in two or three other kinds of something, and you have pneumonia.  Subtract a little and add a little, and you have flux.  Subtract four and add two, and you have fits.  The doctor has treated the effect, and not the cause; therefore it has been necessary to make laws in their favor.

    It has been necessary during the last twenty years to fortify against individual attacks on the system, because the people are like that little girl.  They know how many bones they have in their wrist.  Forty years ago it was not supposed that a woman knew whether she had one bone above the elbow or one hundred, and a great many could not tell.  She could not train her child differently, because anatomy to her was a blank.

    During the last twenty years there has been a discussion as to whether we will be benefited by taking any grade of drugs, or if it would not be better to take some kind of diet.  We have diet-shops in America and in Europe; we buy and eat from both, and grunt just as loud as if we had never heard of either.

    Now let us see what condition man is in.  He occupies all the zones on the globe except a few off north, and we are going to have them occupied by a balloon next week.

    When some travel they must have some peculiar kind of bread, baked on a large-legged skillet or a three-hundred-legged skillet, or they cannot exist.  What are the health resorts?  They are places supposed to have certain kinds of diet; you must eat a certain amount, at a certain hour, and go to bed at a certain time.  In America we go to bed early or late, eat anything we want, and all we want, if we can get it.  We have proven here that the health-grub business is not necessary, and we can do entirely without it; that is, the system of eating just so-and-so or you will die.  If the stomach is connected with the right battery, the brain and the nerves of nutrition are working right, you can eat a long-legged frog and live on it; you can eat dog and thrive on it.  If you don't believe it, just get a piece of beef in this town, and if you can eat it, you can eat anything.  The wise
Architect of the universe put that mill there and it will grind anything that is nutritious.  This being so, there is not much use for your big mills to grind in a certain way as for you to have your battery and machinery so they can run as God in His judgment intended when He put them there.  We find that He is competent and knows how to do His work, and when He has done a job, you can't better it.

    How did I discover Osteopathy?  Who was with me when I discovered it?  Who assisted me in discovering it?  I will give one hundred dollars for the man's photograph who has added one single thought to it.

    I took the position in 1874 that the living blood swarmed with health corpuscles to all parts of the body.  Interfere with that current of blood, and you steam down the river of life and land in the ocean of death.  That is the discovery.  The arteries bring the blood and wash it with the spirit of life.  The living arteries from this world.  It fills all space and forms the clouds.  If God is
competent and knows His business, He has certainly made a good job. With that conclusion shall I sustain His wisdom, and try to work the machine as He has formulated it, or shall I cast my lot with the dark shades of ignorance and superstition?

    When I raised that little flag (Osteopathy) it was not a very large one, but I said I would swear by the eternal God and His works all my life.  If there bad been a bombshell thrown among you tonight, it would create no greater consternation than I did when I declared that God was no drug doctor.  They wanted me to repent before it was everlastingly too late, and thought that possibly for the sake of my father I might be saved.  My own brothers were of the opinion that I was going to the d-l as fast as the wheels of time would take me.  What was my crime?  I declared that God was wisdom and His works a success; that was the crime.

    My brother prayed for me, and I worked for him, and at the end of eighteen years he came to my mourners' bench.  Jacob worked seven years for his wife; I eighteen for my brother.  He comes now and says: "It is the greatest blessing ever bequeathed to mankind."

    In 1874, my honorable brother, whose word is worth all the gold that he could carry on his back, honestly believed that I had one foot in h-1, and be would have to catch me by the coat-tail and jerk me out.  I told him that God blessed no such things as quinine, morphine, opium, whisky, or fly-blisters.  He said to me, "You are talking wild; I advise you to quit that right now.  There is great danger of your being lost.

    Time passed on, and after a little while he said:

    "I would like to talk a little about this matter.  How do you account for fever?  How do you account for a cold head?" I said:
 
    "In proportion to the velocity with which the heart brings the electricity that is generated in the brain, the temperature is high or low."  He said, "I have a pain in my side, and have been thinking of taking a little quinine and Dover's powders." I said to him, "If you will stand here for a moment, I think I can stop it.  It is my opinion that the vena azygos major has failed to disgorge in time."  I gave him a treatment which disgorged the blood, and the man was at ease.  I then said, "If you think you are converted, I will baptize you now."  He was a graduate from a Chicago university of medicine.  I asked him if he had not studied there some about the brain force and nerves?  He answered, "Not in that way!" "Now, when you give a dose of quinine, what do you address it to?  Is it to the circulation of the blood?  What do you expect to do?  Contract the blood vessels and force the blood to run faster?  Do you intend to contract or enlarge them ?"  "I believe," he says, "that the effect is possibly to contract them, though I haven't given much thought on that subject.  It may possibly strike the cerebellum, and force the blood with greater power, through arterial circulation."

    "Did it ever occur to your mind when both mules didn't go up the hill, that one was pulling downward?  How would it do to turn both tails uphill?  The battery of life, the motor force, is throwing the blood from the heart through the arteries, but it is not carried back in the right shape, and it becomes blocked by the veins.  You put your quinine and opium in there, and the vein
opens its mouth and the blood goes on and the circuit is made.  As soon as completed, force of electricity throws it out, and he feels better."

    You asked me to talk to you on this anniversary occasion, and I am talking plainly.  I love God.  What do I love Him for?  Because I cannot find any contradictions when I examine His works.  The rising of the sun is to be depended on. Take the eclipse the other day; mathematics told us to a fiftieth part of a second when it would occur.  Read your papers and see if that is not correct.  When did they tell us?  Twelve months ago.  The mathematics of heaven are perfectly trustworthy. The comets make their time, and are back from their circuit when they promise to be.  The earth goes round the sun on time to a minute.  If she should stop to talk politics, it would jerk your head off.  I love God because His works are perfect and trustworthy, does not need any help, and did not make man's stomach to be a slop-pail for any dopes or pills, big or little.  I love Him who makes pure blood by His machine, takes dead matter and imbues it with living force from crude material, and it becomes a working muscle.  I love Him because He can put the sight in your body, hearing, sense of touch -- in fact, all the five senses, and about five hundred other kinds of senses on top of them.  I love Him because He is a photographer.  What does He photograph?  Your mind is a sensitive plate, and every word that is said is photographed there, and when you want to look at them you raise up the glass; you call that memory.  The sensitive plate takes up your dreams and visions.  That is as old as time.  Some of us do not have to go to sleep to see visions.

    I am glad to meet you here on my birthday.  I do not expect to have many more such celebrations.  I am now sixty-nine years old; next year makes seventy.  My father died at seventy-one, my mother at eighty-nine.  As long as I live I shall be an uncompromising defender of Osteopathy.  I don't need much of it myself, as I am pretty well, but for the sake of the cripples I will try and give a few lessons as to how often they should take treatment and when to quit.  I hope for a brilliant future for Osteopathy.  When I am dead, if I get to come back here, I expect to see Osteopathy ahead of all other "pathies," and men growing up with better minds, brains, nerves, and better all over.

    I thank you for your attention.