History and Evolution of Craniosacral Technique

Andrew Taylor Still, an American physician (1828 – 1917), conceived osteopathy at the beginning of the nineteenth century. He developed a new medical system, called osteopathy, in contrast with the medicine of his day, which relied on prescribing drugs, bloodletting and other therapeutic methods.

In 1874 A.T. Still made the philosophical and practical foundations of osteopathy public for the first time. From then on osteopathy gradually spread through the world and through Europe thanks to J. M. Littlejohn, with the founding of the first European school of osteopathy, the British School of Osteopathy, in 1917; some years later, in 1957, the École Française d’Osteopathie was founded, later becoming in 1960 the European School of Osteopathy and moving to Maidstone in England.

It was not until the Nineteen-eighties that osteopathy gained wider currency, through the establishment of various schools with defined professional training and continuing education.

If Still created a new system of care, it took until the Nineteen-thirties for a certain William Gardner Sutherland (1873 – 1954), an osteopath and a student of Still, to lay the foundations of what we now call craniosacral.

Still an osteopathy student, his interest and attention turned to the observation of a disarticulated skull and, in particular, to the cranial sutures of the temporal bone. Those sutures, he intuited, recalled the gills of a fish and, as such, could be mobile and represent a respiratory mechanism.

His initial insight ran up against the anatomy and physiology books of the time (and still does), which reported that the cranial sutures ossify in the adult and form an immobile, static skull.

Following that first insight, he set in motion a series of experiments and studies that occupied him for years, until he concluded that the cranial bones were part of a system exhibiting subtle, rhythmic movements, independent of other bodily rhythms such as the respiratory and cardiac ones.

Deepening his study and his listening in this direction, in the following years he traced the origin of this movement to several components: the motility of the brain and of the intracranial membrane system, fluctuations of the cerebrospinal fluid, and the mobility of the cranial bones.

For over twenty years W.G. Sutherland studied, through his “fingers”, the delicate rhythmic movements of his patients and developed over time various techniques for working with this system, until he made his results public. Cranial, or cranio-sacral, osteopathy was taking shape.

In 1939 he published the book The Cranial Bowl, setting out the basis of his studies and the premises of cranial osteopathy. Reactions of incomprehension, opposition and ridicule were not long in coming, and he had to wait some years more, until 1946 in Denver, to see an opening towards his work, thanks to other osteopaths such as Harold Ives Magoun (1898 – 1981), Viola Frymann, Rollin E. Becker, Thomas Schooley and Denis Brookes.

From that moment, as the cranial concept spread, a great deal of publication and research in this branch brought forward a growing number of osteopaths who carried on W. G. Sutherland’s discoveries.

Later, another American osteopath, John Upledger, proposed in 1976 a new model, called “pressurestat”, offering a “scientific” basis for the system and going on to experiment with various models such as “energy cysts”, “unwinding” and SER (Somato-Emotional Release).

Sutherland’s work, as a genuine researcher, continued throughout his life, and in his final years he turned his interest towards the perception of movement in neural tissue, the fluid circulation of the cerebrospinal fluid and embryological development, and towards defining the “Potency” as a vital energy able to heal the organism from within, a self-regulating force acting through the body’s homeostatic mechanisms.

His discoveries were transcendent and were not carried forward by the more “mechanistic” schools.

Since Sutherland’s death in 1954, the spread, dissemination and research of his later studies, the “fluid model”, have been carried on by osteopaths such as R. Becker, J. Jealous and Franklyn Sills.