Dr Edward Bach

A brief sketch of his life and work as chronicled in the timeline.

Edward Bach was born at Moseley, near Birmingham, in 1886 and trained as a doctor in London. For several years he worked investigating the role of bacteriology in chronic disease. His researches led him to recognize that there were clear personality types that related to the various patterns of ill health, irrespective of the physical symptoms being presented by the patient. Working with vaccine therapy and later with homoeopathic principles, he moved towards the discovery of the flower remedies. These he felt could help to harmonize the emotional imbalances that he came to see as the real causes of physical illness.

By 1930 he was prepared to give up his successful medical practice in order to search for the plants and trees that came to be known as The Twelve Healers & Other Remedies. Each flower was found to embody the positive and harmonizing force for a negative emotional state, be it fear, resentment or despair. In order to transfer this healing force to a patient, Bach prepared essences from the flowers. This essence, diluted to some extent, could then be taken as a medicine. He found that as the negative moods changed so the person would return towards health.

The healing properties of the remedies were explained by Dr Bach in terms of a philosophy of life that saw a person as much more than the outward physical body that is treated in conventional medicine. Illness, he suggested, was a message from our inner being calling for a change in our way of living and our mental outlook. The primary purpose of the flower remedies is to help us to change and bring us back to a genuinely happy experience of life. These remedies have been in use throughout the world in the years since Bach's death in 1936.

(Adapted from ‘Dr Bach and his flower remedies’ in The Healing Herbs of Edward Bach by Julian Barnard, first published in 1988.)