Dr Edward Bach and The Flower Essence Society – A Brief History
It is now seventy years since Dr Bach first discovered and utilized flower essences as a therapeutic system for health and wellbeing. As flower essence practitioners, we must be eternally grateful to Dr Edward Bach for his pioneering spirit, courage and genius. He alone recognized that our feelings and thoughts are intimately connected to our wellbeing and good health. He understood that flowering plants have qualities that can be transposed into extraordinary medicines through a precise and reverent method of preparation.
Had his life continued beyond fifty years, we can be sure his work would have grown and developed, most probably with the addition of more remedies.
His 38 essences were created in the 1930’s in a time of widespread hopelessness and anxiety in response to the Great Depression, the war and rise of Nazism and Fascism. Not surprisingly, many of his essences deal with despondency, loneliness, despair, mental torture and fear. These emotions are as valid and present in today’s modern times although we now have many and varied new stresses and difficult emotional situations.
In 1979 in North America, Richard Katz and Patricia Kaminski along with numerous practitioners around the world formed the Flower Essence Society and continued to develop the pioneering work of Dr Bach. They sought to develop a systematic method of study, expanding upon Dr Bach’s work. The knowledge and understanding of this method was then applied to develop other new remedies.
This systematic method aims to build an in depth and thorough understanding of each plant and essence and has become known as the Twelve Windows of Plant Perception.
The new essences developed by the Flower Essence Society are known as the FES essences and as a society, they continue to research and carry out clinical trials, compile data from thousands of case studies to verify the efficacy of each and every essence made. These clinical studies are carried out on every essence for at least 10 years before they are released and available to the public. As a result of these consistent trials and studies, we believe both the English and FES essences are of the highest quality and efficacy of essences available today.