Edward Bach

Who they were

Edward Bach (1886–1936) was an English physician, bacteriologist and homeopath, and the originator of the flower remedy system that carries his name.

He is worth an article for two reasons. His conventional scientific work was real and respected, which makes him a poor fit for the usual caricature of the alternative healer. And he described his own method with a directness that his modern advocates tend to soften.

Where they came from

Born near Birmingham, he worked in his father's brass foundry before studying medicine at Birmingham and University College Hospital, London, qualifying in 1912.

His early career was in bacteriology and immunology. Working at University College Hospital and later at the Royal London Homoeopathic Hospital, he investigated intestinal bacteria and their relationship to chronic disease, and developed a set of vaccines — later prepared homoeopathically and known as the bowel nosodes — which are still referenced within homeopathy. Whatever one makes of that endpoint, the underlying laboratory work was conventional, published, and taken seriously by colleagues.

He was chronically ill through much of his life. In 1917 he was reportedly given a short time to live after surgery for a serious illness, and attributed his survival to absorption in his work — an experience that appears to have shaped his conviction that mental state governs physical health.

In 1930, at forty-three, he closed his London practice, gave up a substantial income, and moved to the countryside to look for remedies in wild flowers. He spent his last six years in Wales and then at Mount Vernon in Sotwell, Oxfordshire, and died in 1936 at fifty.

What they taught

Illness as a signal of misalignment. Bach held that disease results from conflict between the soul and the personality — between what a person is for and how they are living — and that physical symptoms are the late expression of an emotional state. Treat the state, he argued, and the body follows.

Thirty-eight remedies for thirty-eight states. He grouped them under seven headings — fear, uncertainty, insufficient interest in present circumstances, loneliness, over-sensitivity, despondency or despair, and over-care for the welfare of others. The system is a taxonomy of distress before it is anything else, and it is a fairly perceptive one.

Simplicity as a principle. He was insistent that the system be usable by anyone without a practitioner, wrote in plain language, and refused to complicate it. The Twelve Healers is about forty pages.

Intuition as method, stated openly. This is the crucial point. Bach did not claim to have tested the remedies. He described identifying them by holding his hand above a flower, or placing a petal on his tongue, and observing the emotional effect in himself — often, by his account, while in the corresponding negative state. He regarded this perception as the proper route to the knowledge and considered laboratory method inappropriate to it. He said so in print.

What we can and cannot say

We can say he was sincere and gave up a great deal. He abandoned a successful career and a comfortable income for a project that made him poor, and he refused to profit from the remedies in the way he easily could have.

We can say his bacteriological work was genuine science, and that his trajectory is a reminder that the boundary between the two is crossed by people, not just by ideas.

We can say the remedies do not perform in trials, as set out under flower essences, and that this is not surprising given how they were arrived at.

We can say his emotional taxonomy has held up better than his pharmacy. The distinctions he drew — between fear of a known thing and unfocused dread, between exhaustion and resignation, between loneliness and preferring solitude — are careful and clinically recognisable, and are probably why the system has lasted.

We cannot say he misled anyone about his method, and it would be unfair to imply it. The concealment, where it exists, is downstream: modern marketing that presents the remedies as having emerged from a doctor's research, without mentioning that the doctor said he found them by intuition and thought that was the right way to do it.

Further reading

• Edward Bach, Heal Thyself (1931) and The Twelve Healers (1936) — both short, both freely available, and both clearer about their basis than anything written about them since.
• Nora Weeks, The Medical Discoveries of Edward Bach, Physician (1940) — by his assistant; devoted rather than critical, and useful for that reason.