To be qualified for a profession you must have a complete training by persons who understand the science thoroughly, and know how to teach it. Like the qualified diplomats of any trade or profession, an Osteopath is not made in a day or a single year. Simply standing by and seeing work done by a competent operator will not qualify you to take the responsibilities of life in your hands. You must be thoroughly acquainted with all that is meant by anatomy — not merely familiar with the names of a few bones, muscles, nerves, veins, and arteries, but you must know them all as found in the latest standard authors. You should be familiar with at least ninety per cent of all the human body before you enter our clinics. There you are taught the use of all of the parts and principles you have recited while in the tiresome yet entertaining books of anatomy, dissection, and physiology, during the anxious months of the schoolroom.
Now you are found worthy to enter the training rooms as an apprentice. Once in the operating rooms, you are in a place where printed books are known no more forever. Your own native ability, with nature’s book, are all that command respect in this field of labor. Here you lay aside the long words, and use your mind in deep and silent earnestness; drink deep from the eternal fountain of reason, penetrate the forests of that law whose beauties are life and death. To know all of a bone in its entirety would close both ends of an eternity.
Solemnity takes possession of the Mind, a smile of love runs over the face, the ebbs and tides of the great ocean of reason, whose depths have never been fathomed, swell to your surging brain. You eat and drink; and as you stand in silent amazement, suns appear where you never saw a star, brilliant with the rays of God’s wisdom, as displayed in man, and the laws of life, eternal in days, and as true as the mind of God Himself.
AT Still MD