Transcribed from E.F. Hollibaugh's Biographical history of Cloud County, Kansas biographies of representative citizens. Illustrated with portraits of prominent people, cuts of homes, stock, etc. [n.p., 1903] 919p. illus., ports. 28 cm. Scanned from a copy held by the State Library of Kansas.
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BENJAMIN P. SMITH, M. D.

The present age is the age of the young man. In all the walks of life, and more especially in the west, is this tendency conspicuous.

Doctor Smith is a son of S.P. and Elizabeth (Neil) Smith (see sketch), and is a Kansan born and bred; was born in the town of Clyde, November 23, 1879. He received a high school education in Miltonvale, graduating In 1895. For the three years following he became interested with his father in farming and stock raising, but deciding to abandon farm life, he entered the American school of Osteopathy in Kirksville, Missouri, in 1898, and received the degree of Doctor of Osteopathy in 1900. He began the practice of his profession in Clinton, Missouri, July 13, 1900.

At the expiration of one year, he returned to Miltonvale, and opened an office where he has given successful treatments; but owing to the science being yet in its infancy, the people require being educated up to it. Osteopathy was discovered in its first germs of truth by Doctor Andrew T. Still, of Kirksville, Missouri. His first statement of the discovery met with ridicule and abuse. No one believed him. He was branded as a fraud, a pretender and impudent quack. Time passed on; through poverty and contempt, he bravely held his own, fought down the opposition of the unthinking until now we have in Osteopathy a science, not perfect, but in a fair way to become so; a science now recognized by more than one state in this republic as a legitimate method of healing diseases and deformity. A science which recognizes no compromise with drugs, in which the healing art reaches the highest pinnacle of approximation to nature. By only the human body to heal itself, using the means which the Almighty has put in the human body to restore natural conditions where these are absent. They contend the body is perfect. When in a natural condition we are in health; when all is not as it might to be, when the adjustment is at fault, if such a term might be used in speaking of the intricate, animate, sentient machine, which we call "man."

The Osteopath corrects the abnormality, regulates the amount and flow of blood, strengthens or diminishes the amount of nerve force traveling through the various channels without any adventitious aid from drugs. Health, absent solely through the presence of the abnormality, returns on the righting of the wrong. That the Osteopaths can and are doing these things every day, is a demonstrated truth. Osteopathy is practiced in all the states, and sixteen of them have legislative enactment to that effect. - [Doctor B.P. Smith has entered the Medico-Chirurgical College of Kansas City, since the above matter was compiled. He will not abandon the science of Osteopathy by any means, but will finish a course in the Medical College that he may administer either successfully in his practice. - Editor.