Short history of the Bach Floral Remedies
Edward Bach (24th of September, 1886 – 27th of November, 1936) was a known British bacteriologist, homeopath and writer, father of a famed therapeutic method, the “Bach floral remedies”, a form of alternative therapy inspired by the traditional homeopathic medicine.
Edward Bach begins his medical studies at the age of 19 at the “University College Hospital” of Birmingham, obtaining a diploma in Public Health at Cambridge. Destiny brought him a diagnosis of spleen cancer followed by a surgical intervention, the prognosis envisaging a 3-month life hope. Turning to the medical knowledge he had acquired, both allopath and alternative, Bach managed to control his disease for yet another 19 years.
As from 1919, he worked at the Clinic of Homeopathy in London, promoting Samuel Hahnemann’s principles of homeopathic medicine and laying the bases of the so-called intestinal (bacterial) nosodes, an important discovery for the homeopath therapeutics, which led to the development of homeopath medicines able to solve dismicrobisms induced by the saprophytic flora rendered pathogenic by antibiotic treatments. This element was integrated in the homeopathic medicine by Edward Bach in collaboration with other two reputed figures of the specialty medicine of the time (John Paterson and Charles Edwin Wheeler), by associating the varieties of intestinal bacterial flora with the personal constitutional typologies postulated by the homeopathic medicine.
Beginning with 1930, Edward Bach changed the direction of his therapeutic preoccupations, being interested in discovering new perspectives of therapeutics based on elements capable of changing the medical paradigm of those times. He spent entire months studying the green nature, and he discovered he could keep a special relation to it, in particular to what we might call “the world of flowers”. As an overall result of these experiences, he concluded flowers feature a distinct curative potential “hidden” not only in their petals, but also in the other floral constituents, despite the fact none of the remedies included in his method properly contained some of the physical constituents of a flower. Having a professional education based on the requirements of allopathic medicine, doctor Bach intended to understand the causal territory of all illnesses. In this respect, his attention was drawn by the fact certain people were vulnerable to pathogenic agents, unlike others who were immune to those agents, given similar condition of health (official statistics ascertaining, in percentages, the report of the two categories of potential patients is available). In consequence, doctor Edward Bach postulated all pathologies are the result of a conflict of variable intensity between a constituent specific to the sentient human being, called soul, and another constituent of that, resulted from the experiential buildups, called personality.
Thus, the Bach floral remedies represent a therapeutic perspective focused on “treating the patient’s person (personality)” thought to be the causal root of all pathologies, in view of the integrative union of these two structural elements of the human being in a balanced manifestation.
As a homage paid to the inspiration which guided him to this therapeutic vision, Edward Bach offered, in the spring season, free consults and treatments to all people who asked for it.