“There is no true healing unless there is a change in outlook, peace of mind and inner happiness.”
—Edward Bach
Even though Dr. Edward Bach (inventor of the Bach Flower Remedies, known in the United States as “flower essences”) was, first and foremost, a medical doctor, he came to believe that shifting a person’s mental or emotional state was the most important step in healing. He spent time with his patients, listening to them talk and paying attention to how they behaved and what they seemed to believe. In his own life, he had collapsed while taking care of soldiers returning from the war in 1917, was operated on to remove a tumor, and received a death sentence. He was told he had probably no more than 3 months to live. In those days he was a bacteriologist and pathologist, and was doing quite original work in the creation of new vaccines. As soon as he could get out of bed, he returned to his lab to try to advance the research he was doing in the short time he thought he had left. When he got stronger instead of weaker and did not die, he became convinced that it was his sense of purpose that saved his life.
Bach never turned back from that belief. In many respects you could say that it was his conviction that health could be restored in such a way that became the heart of all the research he would do from that point on. Specifically, he believed that illness resulted from changes in expression of the immune response due to an internal conflict between “the purposes of the soul” and how a person actually behaved. For example, was a person following their heart and internal urgings or were they doing what they thought they had to do or were expected to do instead? Far more recent research in the field of psychoneuroimmunology has shown clear links between a person’s emotional state and immune system response. But Bach’s intuition and subsequent experimentation was more specific in terms of emotional and mental patterns and more far-ranging than the current science has yet to explore.
During the years when Bach was working on his flower essence research, he was known as a free spirit around town and was thought to be a bit eccentric because, more and more as time went on, he refused to behave according to typical social conventions. But he was also well-liked because he got along with people quite well and also well-respected as a physician and herbal healer. People who knew him often commented on how robust he was and how he never seemed to get sick. He spent half the year searching for and preparing remedies and the other half working for free with patients who sought his services. Bach died about one year after he believed that his work with flower essences was complete. He was only 50 years old, but he had, in fact, lived 20 years longer than his initial prognosis.