Dr. Bach

Edward Bach studied medicine first in Birmingham and later at the University College Hospital, London, where he was House Surgeon. He also worked in private practice, having a set of consulting rooms in Harley Street. As a bacteriologist and pathologist, he undertook original research into vaccines in his own research laboratory.

In 1917 Dr. Bach was working on the wards tending to soldiers returned injured from France. One day he collapsed and was rushed into an operating theatre suffering from a severe haemorrhage. His colleagues operated to remove a tumour, but the prognosis was poor. When he came round they told Bach that he had only three months left to live.

As soon as he could get out of bed, Bach returned to his laboratory. He intended to advance his work as far as he could in the short time that remained. But as the weeks went by he began to get stronger. The three months came and went and found him in better health than ever. He was convinced that his sense of purpose was what saved him: he still had work to do.

Up to now Bach had been working with bacteria, but he wanted to find remedies that would be purer and less reliant on the products of disease. He began collecting plants and in particular flowers – the most highly-developed part of a plant – in the hope of replacing the nosodes with a series of gentler remedies.

Over years of trial and error, which involved preparing and testing thousands of plants, he found one by one the remedies he wanted. Aiming each at a particular mental state or emotion. When treating the personalities and feelings of patients he found their unhappiness and physical distress would relax naturally as the healing potential in their bodies was clear and allowed to work once more.

A year after announcing that his search for remedies was complete, Dr. Bach passed away peacefully on the evening of November 27th, 1936.  He left behind him several lifetime’s experience and effort, and a system of medicine that is helping many all over the world.

In 1936 a few people began promoting the idea of combining the 38 remedies into one elixir, seeking to solve everyone’s problems with a single mix – an idea that Dr Bach had already tried and abandoned.

“I think now you have seen every phase of the work,” he wrote to his friend Victor Bullen in October of that year, a month before his death. “It is proof of the value of our work when material agencies arise to distort it, because the distortion is a far greater weapon than attempted destruction.”