The Bowel Nosodes
I recently finished restoring my course Understanding & Working with the Bowel Nosodes on my new course support site, and thought to visit the topic here. The bowel nosodes represent one of the more misunderstood & neglected topics in homeopathy. My own acquaintance was awkward; I’d regarded these as something rather marginal, akin to cell salts or drainage. In an early conversation with Farokh Master, one of the most brilliant & compassionate persons I’ve ever met, I mentioned that I’d never used them. You’ll need to imagine his lovely Mumbai accent; he looked at me deeply & responded, “Will, I thought you were an intelligent man!” Coming from Farokh, that was simultaneously a rebuke & a warm hug of compassion. I’ve since found them to be an invaluable aid in practice.
It helps to place these in context with attention to their initial inspiration.
Edward Bach (pronounced “batch,” not like the German composer) was a bacteriologist who happened to live (c. 1919) in a London boarding house with Charles Wheeler, a conventionally trained M.D. who’d converted to homeopathy. Bach was fascinated with the then-popular concept of autointoxication, the notion that the colon was essentially a vestigial organ filled with putrefying bacteria that fermented poisons that contributed to aging & a variety of diseases. This had been promoted within the conventional medical community by Charles Bouchard c. 1866, by Élie Metchnikoff of the Pasteur Institute c. 1904, & others, and remained popular in the conventional medical community through the early 1930s (persisting in the Naturopathic medical community through the present).
Mechnikoff suggested the use of Bulgarian yogurt, containing Lactobacillus bulgaricus, to introduce a presumably “innocuous” bacterium to displace presumed “putrefactive” bacteria, introducing the concepts of bowel dysbiosis and probiotics.
Sir William Arbuthnot-Lane c. 1904-1913 went so far as to perform total colectomies - removal of the entire colon & disposal of this presumably vestigial organ - to treat supposed autointoxication.
Christian Hester M.D., c. 1906, reinforced Metchnikoff’s idea that the primary role of the normal gut bacteria was to check the development of potentially harmful organisms by occupying space that might be exploited by these, characterizing bowel flora as either “putrefying” or “innocuous,” a dichotomy that has persisted in the imagination of the medical community until recent days.
John Harvey Kellogg, c. 1907-1922, studied with both Mechnikoff & Arbuthnot-Lane, and combined their approaches with “Nature Cure,” introducing colonic lavage to “clean” the bowel, the use of yogurt both orally & introduced rectally, and nutritional approaches (including his well-known breakfast cereals) to promote colonic health.
It was this concept of autointoxication by presumably “putrefying” bacteria in the gut that inspired Edward Bach’s experimentation leading to the bowel nosodes.