His parents were slaves and he was born into poverty, yet with a minimum of formal education and much hard work and self-education, Still became a successful and much-respected doctor in the southern New Jersey and Philadelphia areas.

"My mother was a stanch [sic] Methodist," he wrote, "but my father was not, although a great reader of the Scriptures and a believer in them.

"[2] Because of prevailing racial restrictions of the era, and because his physical labor was necessary to help his impoverished family survive, Still spent little time attending school.

During his early teens he was hired out to local residents as a day laborer,[2] "chopping wood, making charcoal, picking berries and 'grubbing'—digging up roots and trees to clear land.

"[1] At the age of 21, he went to work for a glue factory in Philadelphia owned by Charles Cummings; Still's pay was ten dollars per month plus board.

As he matured, Still studied the healing powers of herbs and plants, and developed medical practices based on his own observations.

He began earning a modest income by regularly selling his homemade oils, tinctures, and essences to Philadelphia druggists Charles and William Ellis.

He became so fascinated by the subject that he returned to Dr. Cook's shop two weeks later to purchase a second volume, which he said gave "instructions for making pills, powders, tinctures, salves, and liniments.

"[1] Still's popularity and effectiveness as a self-educated physician aroused the envy and resentment of many formally educated medical practitioners.

"They laughed," wrote New Jersey historian Henry Charlton Beck, "as [Still] went along in his rough [carriage], a cigar-box his medicine chest.

"It seems to me that vegetable medicine is all that is needed for the restoration of health," he wrote, "the voice of the medical faculty to the contrary notwithstanding.

"[2] His various remedies (internal and external), as chronicled in his book, included soda water, lye, catnip tea, vinegar, salts, ipecac, saffron, camphor, Virginia snakeroot, opium, bloodroot, cream of tartar, cloves, comfrey root, horehound tops, skunk cabbage, jalap root, tincture of lobelia, and more.

In 1872, he found himself "much broken down by being overtasked with business, and concluded to give up my outside practice and continue only that which came to my office, hoping to regain my former health."

In addition to his life chronicle, the book contains moral instruction, recipes for "treating fevers and many other maladies," political opinions, family vignettes, and a travelogue of his visit to New Jersey's 1876 Centennial Exposition.

[5] Still's life was chronicled in Henry Charlton Beck's 1936 book, Forgotten Towns of Southern New Jersey, in a chapter entitled "The Doctor of the Pines."

Much of Beck's knowledge of Still's life originated with Still's little-known 1877 self-published autobiography (which was identified on the title page as having been "Printed for the author by J.B. Lippincott").

[1] His brother, William Still, was an abolitionist writer, activist, historian, and conductor on the Underground Railroad, which helped fugitive slaves reach states where slavery had been outlawed.