Dr Edward Bach was gripped by an idea that illness arises due to the personality. He was convinced that the natural state of mankind is health and that this could be reinstated.
He was a scientist of the observe and experiment school. Observation is an ability that may be inborn or can be cultivated. Most of us are born as natural observers but have it gradually educated out of us during childhood. Dr Bach seems to have been one of the lucky people who nurtured the ability by use. He was interested in people, another asset. In a social gathering he is reported to have been interested in all the people and observed their characteristics, but he didn’t stop there, he used the intuitions gained as raw material for his experiments.
Back at work in the hospital, dealing with people suffering various symptoms of illness, he gradually was able to group them into types, and considered the idea that each type would respond to similar medications, regardless of their diagnosis. This is very similar to the ideas of Samuel Hahnemann, father of homoeopathy.
Whether Dr Bach came up with these ideas independently, or was inspired by the work of Sam Hahnemann, is irrelevant. It was never really a new idea, just different from the thinking of the majority, and had surfaced several times in previous centuries in the minds of such physician scientists as Paracelsus. The difference is that all these innovative healers used the intuition in a slightly different way.
Dr Bach was a pathologist and a large part of his hospital work was the problem of chronic dis-ease. His meditations led him to a strong idea of a connection between the personality type and the gut flora. Edward Bach’s early career was carried out in London Hospitals during the nineteen twenties and during this time there was a big emphasis on the colon, so much so that Dr Arbuthnott Lane became a proponent of the belief that toxins resided in that organ and, so he thought, the problems could be cut out along with part of that organ. It sounds preposterous today, but became popular amongst the fashionable ladies who flocked to have the procedure. Every generation seems to think they are more knowledgeable than past generations, and twenty first century people are no exception, .
A huge number of promising gateways were opened in past times only to be abandoned as new things came along. One of these gateways was the exploration of the connection between gut flora and mind state. Dr Bach worked on his ideas with Dr C Wheeler at the Homoeopathic Hospital in London. In the nineteen eighties, Candice Pert, worked on a project correlating emotions with molecules, see her published work, The Molecules of Emotion. Then, in 2015, several studies appeared in newspapers concerning the revolutionary discovery that the state of mind was affected by the predominant gut flora and the gut flora was affected by the predominant state of mind. This was a genius discovery by Edward Bach, dedicated healer physician. Initially, in accordance with his training as a pathologist, he treated patients with an inoculation of the patient’s own bacteria in treated form, with most encouraging results. Later, drawn into the world of homoeopathy, he used the bacteria in attenuated form given by mouth, with even better results.
At the height of his career, with promising results and a large practice, Dr Bach was drawn by a different vision. His desire was to heal people, or help people heal themselves. He had become convinced that all disease was concerned with the personality and had experienced personally the power of life purpose to allow the body and mind to heal itself. He was also by this time, disenchanted with the work of pathology and inspired by a vision of healing with herbs.
So, he began the second part of his career. He left the hospital and practice and headed for the countryside and the flowers, to seek the flowers and herbs that grew freely in the fields and forests and meadows and waysides. He began to believe that people could heal themselves and that he could show them the way. He never required payment or copyrights. He gave away medicines freely. He wrote down his methods and instructed others to do as he did. Then he set about find the flowers and classifying them according to the type of personality or state of mind that they could help.