Success Quote by Andrew Taylor Still

Still writes like a man trying to turn epistemology into a lab instrument. He splits humanity into "successes or failures" not as a motivational poster, but as a diagnostic category: outcomes are evidence. In the late 19th century, when medical practice was a tangle of folk cures, heroic dosing, and speculative theory, his insistence that "success is the stamp of truth" reads as a provocation against credentialed certainty. It’s an early, blunt version of: if it doesn’t work, stop calling it knowledge.

The line that matters is the architecture of his metaphor: facts have a "dome", truth must be "sieved", the "faulty" discarded. This is the language of industry and mechanics, not salons. Still is building a moral hierarchy around method. You don’t merely get the wrong answer; you fail because you didn’t discipline yourself to filter reality properly. The subtext is impatience with medical dogma and with the complacency that comes from inherited authority. He’s implying that error isn’t tragic; it’s lazy.

There’s also a telling compression - "truth" becomes synonymous with "facts", and facts with measurable success. That’s powerful rhetoric for a reformer (and, in his case, a founder of osteopathic medicine), because it licenses rebellion: don’t argue with the establishment, out-perform it. It’s also a trap. Elevating "success" to the arbiter of truth invites survivorship bias and makes messy, partial, long-term realities look like moral failures. Still’s confidence sells a method; it also reveals the era’s hunger for certainty that could be tested, not merely believed.