Edward Bach

Edward Bach (pronounced "Batch") (September 24, 1886 – November 27, 1936) developed Bach flower remedies, a form of alternative medicine inspired by the classical homeopathic traditions.

Biography

Bach grew up in Birmingham, studied medicine at the University College Hospital, London and obtained a Diploma of Public Health (DPH) at Cambridge.

Before turning to alternative therapies, he was a House Surgeon and a casualty medical officer at University College Hospital; he was in charge of 400 beds during World War I; he worked at the National Temperance Hospital and had a successful practice at Harley Street.

Bach nosodes

Later he worked at the London Homeopathic Hospital and he developed seven bacterial nosodes known as the seven Bach nosodes, which have received only limited recognition and their use has been mostly confined to British homeopathy practitioners.

These Bowel Nosodes were introduced by Bach and the British homeopaths, John Paterson (1890-1954) and Charles Edwin Wheeler (1868-1946) in the 1920s. Their use is based on the variable bowel bacterial flora associated with persons of different homeopathic constitutional types.

Bach flowers

In 1930, at the age of forty three, he decided to search for a new healing technique. He spent the spring and summer discovering and preparing new flower remedies - which include no part of the plant but simply the pattern of energy of the flower - and in the winter he treated patients free of charge.

He advertised his remedies in two daily newspapers, but the General Medical Council disapproved of his advertising. In 1934, he moved to Mount Vernon in Brightwell-cum-Sotwell, Oxfordshire.

In his treatise Heal Thyself he writes:

"Disease will never be cured or eradicated by present materialistic methods, for the simple reason that disease in its origin is not material . . . Disease is in essence the result of conflict between the Soul and Mind and will never be eradicated except by spiritual and mental effort."

Bach Centre

The Dr Edward Bach Centre, Mount Vernon, located in Brightwell-cum-Sotwell, Oxfordshire, UK, commonly known as the Bach Centre, or simply Mount Vernon, was the home and working place of Bach during the latter years of his life. Here he performed research into the 38 flower remedies that still bear his name.

The trustees and helpers at the Bach Centre continue to make and provide the mother tinctures for the Bach flower remedies, according to the specific instructions left by Dr. Bach.

The Bach Centre offers help to the public in the form of education, publications and referrals to practitioners. It is open to visitors and aims to maintain the original purity and simplicity of Dr. Bach's work. Their mission statement is Our work is steadfastly to adhere to the simplicity and purity of this method of healing.

E. B. Nash

Eugene Beauharis (E.B.) Nash (born, 1838, Columbia County, New York) was one of America's leading 19th century homeopaths.

He graduated from Cleveland Homoeopathic Medical College in 1874. He served as Professor of Materia Medica in the New York Homoeopathic Medical College, and also taught at the Homoeopathic Hospital of London.

In 1903 he became president of the International Hahnemannian Association (IHA).

He is best known as an author of books on homeopathy. His obituary in The Homeopathic Recorder remembered him as, "one of the great teachers of medicine...[who] will live in his books and in the hearts of the many doctors he has helped to be better physicians," and stated, "There are a host of homoeopathic physicians in different parts of the world to-day that owe their success in healing the sick to the writings of Dr. Eugene B. Nash

Bibliography

Directions for the domestic use of important homeopathic remedies, N.Y., 1874

Leaders in Homeopathic Therapeutics:with Grouping and Classification, Philadelphia, Boericke & Tafel, 1899(1st Ed), 1900 (2nd Ed), 1907 (3rd Ed), 1913(4th Ed)

Leaders in typhoid fever, Philadelphia, Boericke & Tafel, 1900

Leader for the use of sulphur, with comparisons, Philadelphia, Boericke & Tafel, 1907

How to take the case and to find the simillimum, Philadelphia, Boericke & Tafel, 1907 (1st ed), 1914 (2d ed)

Leaders in respiratory organs, Philadelphia : Boericke & Tafel, 1909.

The testimony of the clinic, Philadelphia, Boericke & Tafel, 1911.

John Henry Clarke

John Henry Clarke, MD (1853–1931), was a prominent English classical homeopath.

Dr. Clarke was a busy practitioner. As a physician he not only had his own clinic in Piccadilly, London, but he also was a consultant at the London Homeopathic Hospital and researched into new remedies — nosodes.

Works

Clarke was keen in his writing and it is even said that he had a desk in his carriage. For many years, he was the editor of The Homeopathic World. He wrote many books, his most well-known were Dictionary of Materia Medica and Repertory of Materia Medica (i.e., the Clinical Repertory), both of which are recommended by the FDA's rules on "Conditions under Which Homeopathic Drugs May be Marketed".

List of books by Clarke:

A Bird’s Eye View of the Organon
A Dictionary of Domestic Medicine and Homeopathic Treatment
Catarrh, Colds and Grippe
Cholera, Diarrhea and Dysentery
Clinical Repertory
Clinical Repertory (Indian edition)
Constitutional Medicine
Dictionary of Practical Materia Medica, 3 volumes (British edition)
Dictionary of Practical Materia Medica, 3 volumes (Indian edition)
Diseases of Heart and Arteries
Grand Characteristics of Materia Medica
Gun Powder As A War Remedy
Hahnemann and Paracelsus
Homeopathy Explained
Indigestion-Its Causes and Cure
Non-Surgical Treatment of Diseases of Glands and Bones
Prescriber
Prescriber (Indian edition)
Radium As An Internal Remedy
The Revolution in Medicine
The Therapeutics of Cancer
Therapeutics of the Serpent Poisons
Tumours
Un Diccionario De Materia Médica Practica (3 volumes)
Whooping Cough

Clemens Maria Franz von Bönninghausen

Clemens Maria Franz Freiherr (Baron) von Bönninghausen (12 March 1785–26 January 1864) was a lawyer, agriculturalist and botanist, who also practised and researched homeopathy.

Born on the estate Herinckhave near Fleringen in the province of Overijssel in the Netherlands, into an old titled Westphalian family, he attended school in Münster, Germany before graduating in law from the University of Groningen in 1806. He held various legal positions in the Dutch Civil Service under Louis Napoleon, King of Holland, until the latter's forced abdication in 1810.

Bönninghausen then left the Civil Service, returning to his family estates in Prussia. He devoted himself to the study of agriculture and botany, publishing widely, and was appointed Director of the Botanical Gardens in Münster from 1826-1845.

In 1827, Bönninghausen contracted tuberculosis, then an intractable lung disease. Certain that he was about to die, he began writing farewell letters to his friends. One of these urged him to try homeopathy. Bönninghausen wrote back with his specific symptoms, and was told that the remedy for his ailment was Pulsatilla. He was cured, and thus became a convert to the new therapy. He became a close associate and confidant of Samuel Hahnemann, who admired Bönninghausen's ability to systematize the expanding homeopathic knowledge of materia medica. Bönninghausen's Therapeutic Pocketbook of 1846 was the first homeopathic repertory to grade individual remedies (125 in number) by their strength of relationship with each symptom, and each other, and has remained in use until the present day. He proposed that disparate symptoms associated with a remedy could be grouped as a single overarching tendency, hence the importance of generalities and modalities in his system of case analysis. According to Winston (2001), the method was never fully explained in writing by Bönninghausen, and misunderstood by later homeopaths such as J.T. Kent, although recent translations and revisions point to a revival of interest in Bönninghausen's approach. An early advocate of high potencies, he conducted a successful prospective trial of 200C in domestic animals and livestock, reasoning that veterinary homeopathy was harder to dismiss as a placebo effect.

Practising homeopathy on a small scale without a medical degree, Bönninghausen eventually received a special physician's licence to practise from Frederick William IV, King of Prussia in 1843. As his clientele grew, he saw some notable patients, one of the first being the poet Annette von Droste-Hülshoff.

A memorial to Bönninghausen was installed in the Münster University Botanic Garden in 2005, the quatercentenary of Hahnemann's birth.

James Tyler Kent

James Tyler Kent, M.D. (born in Woodhull, New York, 1849 - died Stevensville, Montana, 1916) was an American physician and significant contributor to homeopathic medicine.

Kent's work came after that of Samuel Hahnemann. He tested, or "proved" many new remedies not considered by Hahnemann, pioneered the use of highly potentized homeopathic remedies, and in 1897 published his repertory, the well-known Kent repertory, on which virtually all modern practise of homeopathy is based.

Kent was notable for denying the conventional germ theory of infectious disease:

'The microbe is not the cause of disease. We should not be carried away by these idle Allopathic dreams and vain imaginations but should correct the Vital Force' (Kent, 1926)

'The Bacterium is an innocent feller, and if he carries disease he carries the Simple Substance which causes disease, just as an elephant would.' (Kent, 1926)

Kent believed that illness had spiritual causes:

'You cannot divorce medicine and theology. Man exists all the way down from his innermost spiritual, to his outermost natural.' (Kent, 1926)

and in the USA, homeopathy came to be associated closely with Swedenborgianism, (the Christian mystical sect of Emanuel Swedenborg, who founded the New Jerusalem Church) All prominent American homoeopaths in the nineteenth century, from Constantine Hering to Kent, were members of the New Jerusalem Church; and the members of the Church were mostly supporters and followers of homoeopathy. In Russia, homoeopathy was similarly closely connected with the Russian Orthodox Church, and the Missionary School of Medicine, founded in England in 1903, was closely associated with the Faculty of Homoeopathy in London in the early 1900's.

In addition to his repertory, Kent is renowned for his books Lectures on Materia Medica and Homeopathic Philosophy.

Samuel Hahnemann

Christian Friedrich Samuel Hahnemann (10th April 1755 in Meißen, Saxony - 2nd July 1843 in Paris, France) was a German physician who founded homoeopathic medicine.

An impressive monument in Washington, D.C.,commemorates Hahnemann's life and works.

Life

Born Christian Friedrich Samuel Hahnemann in Meissen, Saxony, on April 10, 1755, Hahnemann showed early proficiency at languages; "by twenty he had mastered English, French, Italian, Greek and Latin," and was making a living as a translator and teacher of languages. He later gained proficiency in "Arabic, Syriac, Chaldaic and Hebrew."

Hahnemann studied medicine at Leipzig and Vienna. He received his doctor of medicine degree at the University of Erlangen on 10 August 1779, qualifying with honors with a thesis on the treatment of cramps. He began practicing as a doctor in 1781. "Shortly thereafter he married Johanna Henriette Kuchler"; they had eleven children.

Through his practice, Hahnemann quickly discovered that the medicine of his day did as much harm as good:

"My sense of duty would not easily allow me to treat the unknown pathological state of my suffering brethren with these unknown medicines. The thought of becoming in this way a murderer or malefactor towards the life of my fellow human beings was most terrible to me, so terrible and disturbing that I wholly gave up my practice in the first years of my married life and occupied myself solely with chemistry and writing."

After giving up his practice he made his living chiefly as a writer and translator. While translating William Cullen's A Treatise on the Materia Medica, Hahnemann encountered the claim that Cinchona, the bark of a Peruvian tree, was effective in treating malaria because of its astringency. Hahnemann realised that other astringent substances are not effective against malaria and began to research cinchona's effect on the human organism very directly: by self-application. He discovered that the drug evoked malaria-like symptoms in himself, and concluded that it would do so in any healthy individual. This led him to postulate a healing principle: "that which can produce a set of symptoms in a healthy individual, can treat a sick individual who is manifesting a similar set of symptoms." This principle, like cures like, became the first of a new medicinal approach to which he gave the name homeopathy.

Hahnemann began systematically testing substances for the effect they produced on a healthy individual and trying to deduce from this the ills they would heal. He quickly discovered that ingesting substances to produce noticeable changes in the organism resulted in toxic effects. His next task was to solve this problem, which he did through exploring dilutions of the compounds he was testing. He claimed that these dilutions, when done according to his technique of succussion (systematic mixing through vigorous shaking) and potentization, were still effective in producing symptoms. However, these effects have never been duplicated in clinical trials, and his approach has been universally abandoned by modern medicine.

Hahnemann began practicing this new technique, which soon attracted other doctors. He first published an article about the homeopathic approach in a German medical journal in 1796; in 1810, he wrote his Organon of the Medical Art, the first systematic treatise on the subject.

Hahnemann continued practicing and researching homeopathy, as well as writing and lecturing for the rest of his life. He died in 1843 in Paris, 88 years of age, and is entombed in a mausoleum at Paris's Père Lachaise cemetery.

Other Achievements

Although most famous today as the founder of homeopathy, this was not the sole focus of his research. Some of his other discoveries are still in use today, such as the potent Marsh test (for the presence of arsenic in solids). It involved combining a sample fluid with hydrogen sulfide in the presence of hydrochloric acid. A yellow precipitate, arsenic trisulfide, would be formed if arsenic were present.

Some of Hahnemann's notable works include:

1.)Versuch über ein neues Prinzip zur Auffindung der Heilkräfte der Arzneisubstanzen, nebst einigen Blicken auf die bisherigen, (Hufelands Journal der practischen Arzneykunde, 1796)
2.)The Organon of the Healing Art (1810) explains the theory of homeopathic medicine. Hahnemann published the 5th edition in 1833; an unfinished 6th edition was discovered after Hahnemann's death but not published until 1921.
3.)Materia Medica Pura is a compilation of homoeopathic proving reports, published in six volumes during the 1820s (vol. VI in 1827.) Revised editions of volumes I and II were published in 1830 and 1833, respectively.
4.)Chronic Diseases (1828) is an elucidation of the root and cure of chronic disease, according to the theory of homeopathy, together with a compilation of homoeopathic proving reports, published in five volumes during the 1830s.

Hahnemann's other contributions

Hahnemann was not only the "Father of Homeopathy", but made other contributions as well. Hahnemann strongly advocated good hygiene, fresh air, regular exercise, and good nutrition as beneficial to good health. Hahnemann was also campaigned for the humane treatment of the insane in 1792, a year before William Tuke and Philippe Pinel.

Hahnemann also published tracts in which he described the cause of cholera as "excessively minute, invisible, living creatures". Hahnemann's acceptance of the emerging idea of infectious disease before its final proof by Robert Koch and Louis Pasteur indicates some of his medical views incorporated ideas that were at the cutting-edge of contemporary science at that time. These 17th-century epidemiological theories built on the ideas of Girolamo Fracastoro in the 16th century and the discovery of microbes by Anton van Leeuwenhoek one hundred years previously.