The Bach Flower Remedies (1933)

By Dr. Edward Bach - 30 Q&As - Book Summary

Heal Thyself first published 1931 · The Twelve Healers first published 1933.

In 1930, a successful London physician closed his Harley Street practice, walked away from a lucrative career as a bacteriologist and homeopath, and set out into the English countryside to find flowers. Edward Bach had reached a conclusion that made the rest of his life’s work inevitable: the foundation of medicine was wrong. Disease was not what his profession said it was. It did not begin in the body, did not arrive from outside, and could not be cured by attacking its physical manifestations. It began in the soul, expressed itself through the mind, and only finally settled into the tissue — sometimes after twenty or thirty years of warning that nobody had been trained to read.

The volume gathers Bach’s two foundational works alongside material that explains how the system has been used in practice since his death in 1936. Heal Thyself, the philosophical treatise, lays out the cause of disease as a conflict between the Soul and the personality — between the work each life was sent to do and what the personality actually does instead. Bach identifies seven character defects as the real diseases of which physical illness is only the terminal stage: pride, cruelty, hate, self-love, ignorance, instability, and greed. He maps each one to the kind of bodily affliction it produces, and to the part of the body it tends to strike. The Twelve Healers and Other Remedies presents the thirty-eight flower remedies he discovered to address these underlying mental states, organised under seven headings of mood — Fear, Uncertainty, Insufficient Interest in Present Circumstances, Loneliness, Over-Sensitivity to Influences, Despondency or Despair, and Over-Care for Welfare of Others.

The collection also contains an interview with Dr. John Diamond, a physician who integrates the remedies with acupuncture meridian work and kinesiological testing. Diamond articulates Bach’s clinical insight that degenerative disease arises from the gap between a person’s true inner state and the face presented to the world — a gap that may be carried for decades, eating away at vitality, before any symptom appears. The Repertory prepared by Dr. F. J. Wheeler, who worked with Bach from 1929 until Bach’s death, provides an alphabetical index of moods and emotional states cross-referenced to the remedies that address them. It was first issued in 1952 and revised in 1995 by Judy Howard at the Dr. Edward Bach Centre at Sotwell, where the original work continues.

What is offered here is not a manual of symptom suppression. The remedies do not silence anything. They do the opposite — they support the person in recognising what the symptom has been trying to communicate, and then in flooding the nature with the opposing virtue until the original defect is washed away. Hate dissolves under love, cruelty under compassion, pride under humility, fear under trust. The flower waters cement the change the person is already making. The materials are sunlight, water, and blossoms; the cost is nothing; the harm is impossible. Bach insisted his system be kept “free from science, free from theories.” Wild animals, he pointed out, do not require an explanation of why a particular plant helps them when they are ill. They simply find it. He believed humans, given the chance, would do the same.

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