Ira Waymen Collins: Pioneer of Osteopathic Medicine (1860–1945)

Ira Waymen Collins, doctor of osteopathic medicine, was born on July 11, 1860, in Davis County, Iowa, to Robert Henry Collins and Rebecca Jane (Denney) Collins. Robert Collins was a minister, and the family moved often. The 1870 census recorded them in Clark County, Missouri. Ira Collins was one of five children and was listed as having attended school. On the 1880 census, nineteen-year-old Ira Collins was farming the family property in Grove, Iowa, for his widowed mother. He apparently lived in Lincoln, Nebraska, for a time, when he married Dency Helen Kellogg on March 12, 1889, in Kirksville, Missouri. The couple settled in Iowa. They had no children. His wife died in St. Joseph, Missouri, on May 9, 1900, and was buried in Highland Park Cemetery in Kirksville.

While in Kirksville, Collins participated in a two-year program at the American School of Osteopathy and studied under physician and school founder Andrew Taylor Still. Considered the father of osteopathy, Still described the field as a science based on the knowledge of the “structure and functions of the human mechanism, anatomical, physiological, and psychological, including the chemistry and physics of its known elements,” often simplified as “a system, method, or science of healing.”

By 1904 Ira W. Collins, a new graduate of the American School of Osteopathy, and Dr. Herman Taylor Still, one of A. T. Still’s sons, opened the Dr. A. T. Still Osteopathic Infirmary in El Paso, Texas. Collins claimed that the clinic was a branch of the American School of Osteopathy Infirmary in Kirksville, Missouri, and the first such health facility in a school of osteopathy. Advertised as being located in the Hotel Angelus Annex in El Paso at its opening, the infirmary later operated in a building (and mostly likely Collins residence) on 201 W. Missouri Street. In the early 1900s osteopathic physicians commonly converted private homes into hospitals or constructed additions to their existing residences.

In the 1907 El Paso City Directory, Collins was billed as “physician in chief” at the Dr. A. T. Still Osteopathic Infirmary. His sister, Lina Collins, worked as a secretary. The following year also listed Dr. Leslye Hyde as “lady specialist” at the facility, and in 1909 the infirmary also employed N. W. Attebery as an assistant physician.  The city directory’s advertisement in 1909 claimed to have handled more than 4,000 cases, with 1908 being its most successful year.

The facility advertised often in local newspapers. A prominent feature in the classified section of the December 31, 1910, edition of the El Paso Herald promoted Collins and his practice at Dr. A. T. Still’s Osteopathic Infirmary and reported that the clinic spent $10,000 on advertising and expenses, which brought in 2,000 patients and resulted in 15,000 treatments. Patients had all kinds of maladies involving eye, lung, and throat troubles in addition to rheumatism. Case studies that were seen and treated included appendicitis, heart troubles, fits, asthma, “female troubles,” tumors, liver troubles, consumption, indigestion, and numerous other ailments. Explaining the treatments performed by Dr. Collins, the advertisement stated, “Twelve hundred cases of Female Troubles and Appendicitis were cured here in El Paso by Osteopathy; every kind you can think of. All we did was to straighten the organs up so they could drain themselves. Then we freed the nerves and they forced the blood to circulate and it healed everything up.” The feature also provided favorable testimonials from patients. In addition to Collins, the staff at Dr. A.T. Still’s Osteopathic Infirmary included consulting physicians Amelia Burk, Grace Parker, and Paul R. Collins (possibly Ira Collins’s nephew)—all graduates from Dr. A.T. Still’s American School of Osteopathy in Kirksville, Missouri.

Despite his advertised success, Collins contended with challenges from the medical community. In the early twentieth century, El Paso physicians encouraged the enforcement of medical licensing in the city. Often, the individuals targeted were either not traditionally trained physicians or were immigrants. In August 1907 Texas governor Thomas Campbell appointed Collins to represent osteopaths on the State Board of Medical Examiners, but a rift soon developed when the medical board refused to issue osteopathic licenses. Back in El Paso in 1908, Collins, along with Chinese herbalist Ng Che Hok, and doctors Andrea “Anna” Reum and Charles Reum, were arrested for not registering as physicians with the district court and were released under a $500 bond. Collins’s promotional ads indicated a contentious relationship between the osteopath and other physicians in the El Paso medical community. His infirmary’s prominent feature in the December 31, 1910, issue of the El Paso Herald, for example, touted that 1,500 of the 2,000 patients that were treated at his clinic came from other cities or out of state and that they spent $150,000 in the city. Collins offered this commentary in print: “How is that record for a business you did your best to kill, but your lies didn’t count.”

The issue of state medical board licensing eventually prompted Collins to file a lawsuit in the El Paso County court to institute a “test case on the question of the constitutionality of the so-called one board medical law.” He argued that “other schools of healing art had every right to establish independent standards of their own contrary to…the domineering of the American Medical association.” The court ruled against Collins as did subsequent rulings, and appeals carried the case all the way to the United States Supreme Court. The proceeding was described by a report in the El Paso Morning Times as a “unique case in medical jurisprudence, and the first of its kind that has ever been tried” in the U.S. Supreme Court.

Attorneys Millard Patterson and John F. Woodson represented Collins against Texas attorney general Jewel Lightfoot before the U.S. Supreme Court in Ira W. Collins, Plff. in Err., v. State of Texas in late January 1912. On February 19, 1912, Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes delivered the Supreme Court’s opinion affirming the judgment of the lower court. In acknowledging a 1907 Texas statute that established a board of medical examiners and required medical practitioners to register their authority (show proof of medical training and “to prove their diplomas, or existing license, or exemption existing under any law” and subsequently “receive a verification license”) and Collins’s questioning of the law’s constitutionality, Justice Holmes asserted:

It is also admitted that before the passage of the statute he [Collins] had recently spent $5,000 fitting up his place and was deriving a net income from his calling of at least the same sum. He held a diploma from the chartered American School of Osteopathy, Kirksville, Missouri, after a full two years’ course of study there, but it does not appear that he presented this diploma to the board of medical examiners, or attempted to secure either a verification license or license in any form….we are of opinion that the plaintiff…fails to show that the statute inflicts any wrong upon him, contrary to the 14th Amendment of the Constitution of the United States. If he has not suffered, we are not called upon to speculate upon other cases, or to decide whether the followers of Christian Science or other people might, in some event, have cause to complain.

In November 1913 Collins was “convicted of the violation of the state medical act by practicing without obtaining a certificate from the medical board.” Upon conviction, he was fined fifty dollars and sentenced to one day in the county jail. In 1914 an individual launched a $16,000 lawsuit against Collins, who described the litigation as a “frame up.” The suit was thrown out. Newspaper commentary opined, “…the doctors of El Paso were using every effort to keep the board from granting Dr. Collins a permit and after employing the ablest detectives of the state to interview hundreds of his patients they could find nothing but good reports.”  

Despite the ongoing litigation, Collins was still the physician-in-chief of Still’s Osteopathic Infirmary and in 1914 worked alongside Dr. Margaret Alkire as the lady specialist and Dr. Carl Gibson. Advertisements stated, “They cured others. They can cure you.” The infirmary was advertised in the El Paso Herald in September 1916, but it is unknown when the A. T. Still Osteopathic Infirmary closed. In late September 1916 the state of Iowa filed a criminal case, State v. Ira Collins, charging Collins with “practicing osteopathy without a state license.”  

About 1917 Ira Collins married Rosie V. (Smith) Donaldson. The couple lived in Des Moines, Iowa, where Collins was listed as a retired osteopath on the 1930 federal census. By 1935 the couple had moved to Los Angeles, California. While on a visit to Pulaski, Iowa, Ira W. Collins died of urinary ailments on April 10, 1945. He was buried beside his wife, Rosie, who had died in 1943, in Inglewood Park Cemetery in Los Angeles, California.