Good by Madeleine Bastide

Professor Madeleine Bastide has just left us after a long illness kept secret but which she had fought for several years. Two months before her death, she gave a brilliant conference during our last Encounters. Only a few well-informed close friends and relatives were able to marvel at her courage and her strength.

At the dawn of the 1980’s, Madeleine Bastide, a professor of immunology having trained several generations of pharmacists and research workers in Montpellier, took an interest in fundamental research in homeopathy. Very soon her works on thymuline (a neuropeptide regulator) were published in an international scientific magazine with a reading committee, which was quite an achievement at the time. Better yet, and for the first time a new homeopathic cure stemmed from experimental research: thymuline, diluted and enhanced, is today a cure that is frequently prescribed in homeopathic human and veterinarian medicine. An especially promising clinical study is presently under way in Africa. Madeleine Bastide’s scientific creativity was exceptional, and she did not stop there!
As a general secretary of the Monaco International Talks, it was at that time that I saw again my professor of immunology who was interested in our meetings. Her spirit of independence, rigour, freedom of expression and the international nature sought by Her Serene Highness Princess Antoinette of Monaco immediately charmed Professor Bastide who quickly became president of our scientific committee. With her impulse,  we created and financed GIRI (“International Research Group on High dilutions and very low dose effects”) grouping together almost all the researchers working on very high dilutions of substances throughout the world. Madeleine Bastide spent her energy relentlessly in this structure to which she permanently imprinted her intellectual mark and her dynamism. Today GIRI, achieving complete independence, groups together over one hundred research workers from 20 different countries, who all pay tribute to her.
Many first-rate experimental models we must have to remember today, were elaborated by Madeleine Bastide all along her career.
Aware that the fundamental explanation of the biological phenomena observed during the use of very high dilutions of substances could not be content with just a mechanistic and scaled-down approach, she elaborated, together with the philosophy professor Agnes Lagache, Grand-Prize of Rome, an explanatory theory applicable among others to action mechanisms of homeopathy: the theory of  body significant. This theory, put to the test of all the experimental and clinical scientific work results realized to this day, and confronted with all the homeopaths’ daily practices, was never invalidated… We have here an original and innovative approach concerning the transmission of information among the living, which has been increasingly successful.

Let us not forget Professor Bastide’s teaching qualities; she worked very had to defend her conception of homeopathy throughout the world. Through the power of elaborated theory, she succeeded incredibly in gathering all the trends of thought in a harmonious scientific coherence.

Furthermore, at the end of the 1990’s, brought about to work on low frequency magnetic fields corresponding to the wavelengths of mobile telephones, she was the first one to observe the harmful effects of these emissions on chicken embryos. The kind of work – confirmed subsequently by other teams – which once again required considerable energy to circulate in spite of the pressures from the industrialists concerned.

It is impossible for me to cite all the prizes and medals she received during her long career, because there are too many of them.
Madeleine Bastide also had a successful family life. A mother of four boys and grand-mother of more than ten grand-children she was so proud of, she passed away surrounded by her close relatives.

To conclude, I recount the message sent by Dr. Bernard Long to SMHMP:
“I am announcing the death of Madeleine Bastide on Sunday evening. She was a great lady, humane, with an incredible energy, sparkling, strict (sometimes peremptory), brave. Her homeopathic work is considerable. She will remain and undoubtedly will contribute in setting up a bridge between our medicine and experimental science, to lead us away from the outmoded speech setting us apart from our colleagues”.

René-Philippe Halm