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Jacob Davis Babcock Stillman (1819–1888) was personal physician to Leland Stanford, the eighth governor of California. He is "'credited with counseling Mrs. Stanford sufficiently so that after eighteen years of marriage, she bore a son, Leland Jr., in whose memory Stanford University was established by his father.' The nature of this miraculous counseling is not specified."[1][better source needed]
Stillman wrote the book The Horse in Motion (1881) for Stanford, a study of the different strides of horses, based on the photographs that Eadweard Muybridge) had produced for Stanford. Stanford wanted to breed and train fast horses, but didn't trust most of the theories and images of their fast movements. When Muybridge published the chronophotographic picture sequences in 1878 as cabinet cards entitled The Horse in Motion, the actual positions of the legs during the different phases of trot and gallop had surprised a public accustomed to unrealistic paintings of horses in motion. Muybridge sued Stanford because the publication lacked proper credits for his work and the many illustrations based on his pictures.