The SCC is an independent post graduate teaching organisation that was founded in 1993. We have a commitment to promoting and teaching the principles of osteopathy as conceived by Andrew Taylor Still and developed by William Garner Sutherland.
(Read more about Andrew Taylor Still and William Garner Sutherland)
With this work increasingly in demand from both within the osteopathic profession and from the public, it is important to be able to recognise practitioners who are skilled in using Osteopathy in the Cranial Field. To fulfil this need, the SCC has developed a pathway for learning leading to a post graduate qualification in Osteopathy in the Cranial Field.
On successful completion of the Pathway, osteopaths will be invited to become members of the SCC which will entitle them to use the postnominal letters MSCC. This is a nationally recognised standard of competence in Osteopathy in the Cranial Field. Members can be found on our Members List.
Experienced pathway members and completers can apply to train to become tutors under the Assistant Tutor scheme (59 KB pdf file).
The College is a registered charity, run by a board of trustees who are elected from amongst the teaching faculty. Many of our faculty have studied with osteopaths who themselves were students of Dr Sutherland, including Dr Anne Wales and Dr Rollin Becker. This association has had a profound and lasting influence on our work.
(More about Dr Anne Wales and Dr Rollin Becker)
In addition to its extensive pathway for learning and post-pathway courses, the SCC also presents the biennial Rollin Becker Memorial Lecture. This series of lectures, inspired by the memory of Dr Becker and his teaching, features leading figures in the Cranial Field who are in the forefront of osteopathic thinking today.
Chair: Liz Hayden
Treasurer: Jeremy Gilbey
Other board members: Lynn Haller
Dianna Harvey-Kummer
Christiana Schumacher
Andrew Taylor Still (1828 – 1917), founder of osteopathy, was a medical doctor in America’s Midwest. He had been in practice ten years when, in a devastating two-week period, he lost three of his own children and an adopted girl during an outbreak of meningitis. Heartbroken and utterly disillusioned at the inefficacy of the drugs of the day, he embarked on a quest to find a better way of practising medicine.
Going back to first principles – anatomy and physiology – he founded osteopathy in 1874 on the premise that every cell of the body is constantly striving to express perfect health. Dr Still determined that instead of trying to control the physiological changes called disease with drugs, the role of the doctor should be to create the right conditions for the body to heal itself. He built osteopathy on the principle that, for their normal function, cells require an uninterrupted supply of oxygen and nutrients, removal of the waste products of cellular metabolism, and regulation of the circulation by the nervous system. This will only occur efficiently, he discovered through long experience in practice, when the structure of the body is free from mechanical derangement.
Through cultivating his sense of touch and developing methods of correcting joint and soft tissue strains, he discovered that he had found a system of treatment that was both curative and preventative, and applicable to virtually every condition. He rapidly gained a reputation for tackling every disease he was presented with. Treat the cause, he would say, and the effect will disappear.
Still founded the first osteopathic school in the small town of Kirksville, Missouri in 1892. Known affectionately as the "old doctor", within five years he had trained 500 osteopaths (including several of his own children), and at any one time there were 500 patients lodged in the town, receiving treatment at the infirmary. This enormous success was built on his reputation alone, without any advertising. By the year of his death, Still had trained over 6,000 osteopaths. In that same year, one of his students, a Scot named J Martin Littlejohn, opened the UK's first osteopathic school, the British School of Osteopathy, in London.
William Garner Sutherland (1873-1954) had the opportunity to study with Dr Andrew Taylor Still, the founder of the science of osteopathy. In his teaching, Dr Still always emphasised the design for motion in the articulations of the bones.
One day in 1899, during Sutherland's senior year at the American School of Osteopathy, he viewed a specially prepared and mounted skull. At that moment, Sutherland experienced a flash of insight which saw the articulation of the spheno-squamous suture as a design for motion that implied a respiratory mechanism, "like the gills of a fish". Given the statements in anatomical texts that the sutures of the cranium ossify in the adult, he had much scepticism and reservation about his own insight for years. During his in-depth studies in the following years, Dr Sutherland had to confront the fact of a mobility that has no muscular agencies to account for the motion.
This kind of study of the mechanics of articular mechanisms of the living human body led him to recognise powers within his patients which could resolve problems and heal strains. Based on what he learned from his patients, Dr Sutherland developed many ways of practising osteopathy. He considered that he was utilising a profound science which just kept unfolding its truths. Dr Sutherland often said in his lectures that if you understand the mechanism, the treatment is simple.
(from Teachings in the Science of Osteopathy, edited by Anne L Wales DO, Sutherland Cranial Teaching Foundation, ISBN 0-915801-26-4)
Dr Anne Wales (1904 - 2005) began her studies at the American School of Osteopathy before transferring to the Kansas City College of Osteopathy and Surgery. Following her graduation in 1926, she served an internship at the Lakeside Hospital in Kansas City, Missouri. She then proceeded to practice in Rhode Island for fifty years before retiring to live in North Attleboro, Massachusetts.
In 1943 she and her husband, Chester Handy DO, first heard Dr Sutherland lecture at the meeting of the Eastern States Osteopathic Association in New York City. The following year they attended the course that Dr Sutherland presented in New York. Based on their experience at that course, they were moved to learn the practice of osteopathy as Dr Sutherland had practised it and as he taught it. As part of their study, they began attending the meetings of the Lippincott Study Group in Moorestown, New Jersey. From 1945 to 1956 the New England Cranial Study Group met at their office in Providence.
From the time of their first course, Drs Wales and Handy dedicated their professional lives to the study, practice and teaching of Dr Sutherland's work. Over the years they were active in Dr Sutherland's teaching programme and in the work of the Osteopathic Cranial Association. Dr Handy was one of the incorporators of the Sutherland Cranial Teaching Foundation Inc.
During her retirement Dr Wales continued meeting with study groups in New England and teaching in both formal and informal settings. She was especially appreciated in the UK as a direct link with the teachings of Dr Sutherland, and for a number of years members of the SCC's faculty visited her in order to deepen their knowledge particularly of Dr Sutherland's Osteopathic Approach to the Body as a Whole.
(from Teachings in the Science of Osteopathy, edited by Anne L Wales DO, Sutherland Cranial Teaching Foundation, ISBN 0-915801-26-4)
Rollin E Becker DO (1910 -1996) was an osteopathic physician from Dallas, Texas. He came from a family steeped in osteopathic tradition. His father, Arthur Becker, taught with Dr A T Still, the founder of osteopathy, in Kirksville, Missouri and he continued the teaching after Still’s death.
Rollin Becker graduated from the Kirksville college in 1933 and for a while practised general medicine in Oklahoma and Michigan, before moving to Dallas. He met Dr Sutherland in 1944 and decided to dedicate his practice to the development of osteopathic principles that Dr Sutherland was teaching. For more than five decades he followed the principles of Drs Still and Sutherland by refusing to focus on simply relieving symptoms, but by contacting the health within his patients and allowing their own resources to do the healing. Throughout his career, Dr Becker treated thousands of patients with conditions ranging from hypertension to pneumonia to Parkinson's disease to whiplash, all with the principles of osteopathy.
Since joining the teaching faculty of one of Dr Sutherland's courses in 1948, Dr Becker taught, to many hundreds of students over the course of forty years, the osteopathic approach that gently prompts the patient's body to heal itself. From 1962 to 1979 he was President of the Sutherland Cranial Teaching Foundation, an educational organisation in the USA dedicated to perpetuating the teachings of Dr W G Sutherland.
Dr Becker saw how important it was to teach these principles and skills as widely as possible and he became a great supporter of the development of the teaching in Great Britain. In 1973 he met Mr Colin Dove, then the Principal of the British School of Osteopathy (BSO), London, and now the President of the SCC, and thereafter, until
the year before he died, Dr Becker travelled many times to London to teach on postgraduate courses. It is to Dr Rollin Becker DO more than to any other that we owe the development of Dr Sutherland’s concept of osteopathy in England. Thus it is in his memory that in 1998 the SCC introduced the Rollin Becker Memorial Lecture, dedicated to the further development of Dr Becker’s work, which is held every two years in London.