Osteopathy has a complicated history. It started with one man in Missouri in 1874, split into competing movements, crossed the Atlantic, got regulated differently in every country, and today means different things depending on where you are.
I mapped all of it.
The scope
100+ nodes across eight categories. Founders and pioneers. A.T. Still, Littlejohn, Sutherland. Key figures who developed major techniques. The techniques themselves. cranial, visceral, MET, counterstrain, HVLA, fascial, biodynamic. Schools and institutions. The legal and recognition landscape per country. Organizations that shaped the profession.
150+ relationships connecting them. Founded, developed, student of, influenced, brought to, opposed, regulated by, split from.
What the graph reveals
The DO versus MD struggle in America that almost killed the profession. The 1962 California crisis. How Littlejohn brought osteopathy to the UK in 1917 and it spread across Europe from there. Why France became the largest osteopathy market in the world. How different countries regulate differently. and why that matters for practitioners.
These connections aren't visible in a textbook. A timeline shows sequence. A graph shows influence, opposition, and evolution all at once.
The audience
This was built to be professional enough to present to European osteopathic associations. Timeline filters, category filters, search, detail panels. Not a toy. an educational tool for the profession.
D3 force-directed graph. Vanilla JavaScript. No frameworks. Built in a day through conversation, starting from the question: "How did we get here?"