As many innovative therapeutic approaches, the Craniosacral Therapy is born from a "casual" observation.

One day, the 50's, a young American osteopath, William Gardner Sutherland, observing a skull and crossbones wondered if the sutures that could be noticed on the surface of the whole skull were welded or no, if these sutures had an anatomical-physiological importance or they were a graphic imagination of whom to the origin conceived this perfect machine that became the man.

Sutherland, unlike many his contemporaries, was convinced the Nature doesn't do anything accidentally and therefore he started to look for the way to be able to understand better the reason of the presence of these sutures.

He decided to experiment on himself what could happen if something compressed only a bone of the cranial structure. To be able to realize this his attempt, he took a foot-ball helmet and he added a stuffing in correspondence of a determined bone of the cranial vault, when he worn it relatively compressed a redoubt surface. The compression of a determined point provoked, spent a certain period of time, the insurgence of discomforts both physicists and psychic, that they resolved in the moment in which he removed the helmet. Sutherland made various attempts of circumscribed compression thanks to this helmet: from time to time he changed the location "of the stuffing" and from time to time he took note of the changes that happened both to his physicist and emotional level. With the time and the patience he succeeded in creating a sort of map: he described for every compressed bone, for example the parietal one rather than the frontal or the occipital one, the symptoms, the discomforts, the uneasiness that appeared following that determined compression. A thing certainly surprised him: once suspended the induced compression artificially, the troubles that revealed him following the same compression they disappeared. Sutherland was not aware of it but these observations put him on the road to throw the base of the Craniosacral Therapy.

Needless to say that this first series of experiments instead of giving some answers didn't do whether to set other questions.

One among these were: have the different sutures calcified as until then it supposed? The fact that a forced compression produced a' negative effect made to suppose of no.

In this case the histological inspection of the sutures gave a clear answer to Sutherland. In fact while the tissutal structure of the skull is formed of osteocytes or rather cells whose structure is specialized to form bone tissue, that of the sutures is formed of chondrocites, or rather cells whose structure is specialized to form cartilaginal tissue. In a healthy body, where we can observe the presence of cartilaginal tissue? In the articulations. Which is the assignment of an articulation? To allow, precisely, the articulation of two surfaces, two different segments. Then the sutures are the plans of articulation among the different bones of the skull.

And we have come to a first turn: if we are in front of a structure that is able to articulate, it wants to say that they are some "forces" that engrave a particular movement for which the presence is necessary of an articulation!

In addition to have individualized the presence of chondrocites to level of the sutures, it was identified the presence of collagen and elastic fibers as well as nervous and vascular plexes inside the same sutures: all that will be able to suppose the presence of a reflex of stretching in the sutures. But what produces this "stretching"?

Sutherland's research goes from the outside to the inside: it is initiated with the bony structure, with the articular mobility of the skull. At this point it begins the connection among cranial bones, the movement of the nervous system and, in the end, the power transmitted by the fluids.