A.T. Still University
medical school
A.T. Still University (ATSU) is a private medical school located in Kirksville, Missouri, with a second campus in Arizona and third campus in Santa Maria, California. It was founded in 1892 by Andrew Taylor Still and was the world's first osteopathic medical school. It is accredited by the Higher Learning Commission. ATSU includes three campuses on 200 acres with seven schools and colleges.
History
Missouri
In 1892 in Kirksville, Missouri, Dr. Andrew Taylor Still founded the first osteopathic medical school in the world. Originally known as the American School of Osteopathy (ASO), the inaugural class of 21 students graduated in 1894. In 1892 Still hired William Smith, a formally trained Scottish physician, to serve as the first anatomy professor of the school. Several other early osteopathic schools eventually merged with Still's school including the Atlantic School of Osteopathy (1898–1905), which had been based in Wilkes Barre, Pennsylvania and then Buffalo, New York.
In 1908, the school established a nursing program.
This brief starts where responsible research should: with the source description of “A.T. Still University” as medical school. Everything that follows is an evidence route, not borrowed authority.
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The subject matters to the history & society register because the source frames it as medical school. Its deeper value depends on whether names, dates, institutions and citations support that framing.
Contemporary correspondence, administrative files and participant testimony can test how later narratives organized the event or institution. The source revision retrieved here is dated Aug 9, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q4647420. VIAF identifies the subject as 145247035. Authority coordinates are 40.194, -92.579. 1 of 4 selected statements include explicit references; 1 carry qualifiers and 0 use preferred rank. The first chronological checks are 1892, 1894, 1898 and 1905.
Official terminology may obscure informal participation, dissent or communities documented only indirectly. The lead is largely declarative, so disagreement and counter-evidence require a deliberate search beyond the opening account. Authority statements aid reconciliation but still require their own references, qualifiers and ranks to be checked.
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This entry incorporates text from “A.T. Still University” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.