Bury, Elvia (1928 – 2022)

Elvia Alice Bury (née Armstrong, 31 May 1928 – 11 August 2022) was a noted South African homeopath who worked and volunteered in townships and provided homeopathic medical care and teaching across southern and central Africa for more than five decades.

Although not a qualified medical doctor, Elvia Bury was a student of Donald Foubister, chief pediatrician at the Royal London Homeopathic Hospital. She was also a close friend and colleague of scientist and Radionics advocate Malcolm Rae, and of South African homeopath and yogi teacher, Norma Harman, aka Swami Narayani.

Elvia Alice Bury was born in May 1928, the daughter of Robert Stuart Armstrong (1898 – 1982) and Viola Jane Wande (1899 – 1952).

Elvia Bury’s mother, Viola, suffered from severe adult-onset Asthma that left her bedridden. Bury was her mother’s only carer, whilst also working as a dentist’s assistant. When Elvia Bury was just 20 years old, her mother died, aged 50, as a result of medical negligence. A combination of a hysterectomy gone awry, and the administering of adrenalin and ephedrine for her asthma, over strained her heart. Her loss deeply affected Elvia Bury, and inspired her to help others.

After receiving a flight training scholarship, Elvia Bury learned to fly at the youthful age of 17. As she later recalled, this enabled her to travel solo as a Bush Pilot and perform basic dental work in remote parts of South Africa.

In August 1956, aged 29, Elvia Bury met and married Lancashire-born former R.A.F. pilot and business executive Nathan “Alex” Alexander Bury (1923 – 18 February 2008) in Durban, Natal. They had three sons, Marcus, Malcolm, and Guy, and Alex’s daughter Jacquie from a previous marriage. All three sons had asthma, each progressively worse than the one before. Concerned that Guy would not live to adulthood, Elvia Bury looked to find an alternative to the drugs that she believed had killed her mother:

When I was around 35-37, I met Narayanji (Norma Harman) at North Beach Homeopathic Pharmacy, Natal. We became friendly with each other and so it started an interest in Homeopathy. My husband was not keen on Homeopathy or any alternative, he had a lot of medical friends who warned him against it. When our son got sick with asthma I would be unhappy if drugs where given to him and my husband would be unhappy if I didn’t. It became such that I didn’t pursue it (Homeopathy) much. Then one year, due to Alex’s business commitments, we took a Christmas holiday in Europe with the children. Alex would then go onto the USA and I would return home, to South Africa, with the children. This is when it all changed for me.

While in London in December 1967, Elvia persuaded her reluctant husband to take their young son, Guy, to see Dr. Donald Foubister, chief pediatrician at the Royal London Homeopathic Hospital, at his private Wimpole Street practice:

Foubister saw patients during the week and Nelsons would post his prescriptions out on the Friday. We were leaving for a skiing trip the next day, for a week. I wondered if the child would survive. We started the treatment straight away. It was miraculous. In Austria this child had color in his cheeks, eating normally and rolling in the snow. It was so impressive that I would pay the return visit when we got back to London.

When Elvia Bury visited Foubister to thank him, he explained that Guy would require further homeopathic treatment back in South Africa. The problem, he explained, was that there were only three homeopaths registered in South Africa, and none in their home of Natal. Foubister, however, had a solution, saying to her, “My girl, you are going to have to do this yourself.” For Bury, this was exactly the encouragement she needed:

Now, I had been praying for 20 years to be able to get help, and suddenly someone says you have got help. I could hear bells ringing. I could feel God slap me on the shoulder and say “Go for it girl, there you go, that’s my answer for you,” because I had prayed for so long.

Foubister directed Bury to the nearby British Institute of Homoeopathy, where she registered for training. Soon after, her husband left for a three month work trip to the United States, while she returned to South Africa. There, she immersed herself in learning homeopathy, and almost immediately, on seeing the health of her son, received numerous requests from friends for homeopathic treatment. By the time her husband returned home three months later, Elvia Bury was regularly treating patients, and had embarked on a lifelong career as an homeopath.

Foubister remained Bury’s guide and mentor, and she visited him in London every year. For a period in the 1970s, the Bury’s resided in Buenos Aires, Argentina. There, after informing the college registrar that Foubister was her teacher, Elvia was permitted to take classes that were ordinarily part of the three-year post-graduate medical course in homeopathy:

When I sat in lectures I had to take a dictionary, my Boericke and my note book. I sat on the edge of my chair all the time and listened to the most wonderful lectures. Paschero, Masi-Elizalde and Candegabe, such wonderful lecturers. I can still remember some of the lectures those men gave: Candegabe on Silica, Masi-Elizalde on Tarantula, this was in the 1970’s. It was because I had said that Foubister was my mentor and their respect for Foubister allowed me in, many didn’t want me there, I was not sure I was accepted. I spent a year going to the lectures.

Whilst in Argentina Bury struggled to find consistently prepared homeopathic remedies. When she next visited Foubister in London, and mentioned how this made practice problematic, he revealed that he was testing a machine designed by a brilliant and reclusive scientist, Malcolm Rae. This “Radionic” device used magnetic cards that allowed remedies to be accurately and consistently made, whilst also helping them to last longer.

Bury visited Malcom Rae in Catford and they quickly became friends. Rae sent her back to South Africa with over 2000 of his magnetic cards, produced by his company Magneto Geometrics. Every year she visited Rae in London, Bury returned to South Africa with a new batch of the cards, eventually owning 4000 of them. As she later noted, through her mentor Foubister she had met Rae, whose magnetic cards were a major turning point in her career:

But for him, my practice changed, I could now produce Homeopathic substances at no cost, very little cost, and this enabled me to work in townships and start the Mission School of Medicine (MSM) …. Rae expanded my potential. From the limited domestic clinic to widespread, where it is needed most.

It was during her stay in Argentina, in the mid-1970s, that Elvia Bury learned of new restrictions on lay/professional homeopaths back in South Africa. This forced Bury and many other homeopaths who had practiced without credentials, such as Wendy Singer, to either give up work or take an accredited course and apply for registration. As a result, Bury took a course at the British Institute of Homoeopathy.

Around the same time, Bury wrote three booklets on homeopathy: one for the elderly, one for children, and one for the Salvation Army. She brought many of these with her when she took over at Norma Harmen (Narayani)‘s clinic in Durban after she moved to India.

Harmen (Narayani) had a significant influence on Bury’s career as an homeopath. It was through Harmen that Bury learned to use a pendulum. Bury discovered that Foubister also used a pendulum, taking his patient’s notes home at the end of a week and using his pendulum to work out which remedies where needed. She subsequently incorporated pendulum dowsing in her practice, and explained her method:

I would not go to a remedy with the pendulum, unless I had no reference. If a remedy resonates I go and read up on it. Once I had pains that worried me day and night for days. I was in despair. I got up one night and went to my study and asked the Materia Medica which remedy is it. It settled on P, then Plumbum. I had a strangulated hernia.
When beginning to use your pendulum, test if something is butter, or are you a woman, something that you know is a yes or no. Don’t look at the pendulum with such intensity. Let it be. It is its own force and ask God in you to guide the pendulum.

Another inspiration for Elvia Bury was the London Missionary School of Medicine (MSM, later, the Medical Service Ministries). This had been established in 1903 by the British Homeopathic Association to teach missionaries basic homeopathy and first aid, and was based at the Royal London Homeopathic Hospital, under the leadership of Dr. Edwin Awdas Neatby. The instruction that was offered at the school appealed to Bury’s independence of spirit that had led her to become a homeopath:

From the beginning I knew that others could do it for themselves. That’s why I wrote those booklets. I do believe that God did not expect medicine to be practiced as it is today but that one can heal oneself and only occasionally you would need someone who had greater skills, rather than running to the Doctor for antibiotics (anti-life), a vicious downward spiral. You don’t have to have a degree to practice Homoeopathy as a lay person….

I wanted to bring simple, brilliant remedies into the hands of every household, so that every mother can avoid antibiotics, vaccinations etc, every mother could be in charge of their families health and then a few well trained people who can take it to the next level. That’s where David could get Goliath.

Shortly after the death of her husband, Alex, in 2008, Bury founded The School for Rural Medicine in Africa. A chance meeting in her home town of Hermanus with missionary and theologian Francois du Toit, leader of African Inroads, an organization that promoted inter-faith teaching across Central Africa, and his wife Lydia, a nursing sister, led Bury to suggest resurrecting the work of MSM in Africa. The du Toit’s enthusiastically agreed, and asked Bury to speak to a meeting of almost thirty African pastors.

The outcome of this meeting was that the pastors all agreed to send two members each from their communities to study homeopathy for ten days with Bury. In November 2010, ten men and ten women arrived in Hermanus, where Bury taught them homeopathic first aid, sending each back home with a case of thirty remedies.

Although none of these first students were South African, very soon after Bury received a warning letter from the authorities ordering her to cease teaching homeopathy, or face a heavy fine or even imprisonment. This catalysed Bury, who resolved to take her new MSM on the road to visit the students. Over the next few years she traveled to Central Africa, Malawi, Zimbabwe, and Zambia, assisting her students in rural clinics.

Many of her first group of twenty students continued to practice homeopathically in their home countries, innovating and prescribing in ways that were unique to their practices. Bury provided her instruction and medicines for free, and the students would similarly provide medical treatment in their communities for free, as far as possible, and always for free to those who could not afford to pay:

The whole point of this, I think, is not only a humanitarian exercise, it is to show what the unskilled, uneducated, lay practitioner can achieve in communities where there is no other help. They are choosing Homoeopathy over Allopathy, because the results are so dramatic.

Nevertheless, it became apparent to Bury that it was the Bishops and pastors she had first met in Hermanus who were actually the most interested in learning homeopathy, and ministering medically to their congregations. Bury began instructing these men and women in homeopathy, recalling that:

It has been very helpful to work through churches, because the venues are already created. The trust and faith in the Bishops and Pastors from their congregation mean they are the best equipped to help the people they know. I thought they would be too busy, but this has become one of their major interests. These churches have welcomed Homoeopathy, and many churches have one day set aside for ministry healing

Elvia Bury featured in a documentary on her Mission School of Medicine that she made available on her Youtube channel in July 2015:

 

In 2016, an interview with Elvia Bury, conducted by Dutch homeopath Corrie Hiwat, was published in Homeopathic Links.

A notable capstone to Elvia Bury’s career as a homeopath occurred courtesy of one of her patients in Natal. The woman’s recently deceased father had been a wealthy man. He had also been a domestic practitioner of homeopathy, and a collector of homeopathic books. One of these books turned out to be the first part of a German original, first edition, of Samuel Hahnemann‘s Chronic Diseases, with Hahnemann’s provings in his own handwriting. Bury withdrew her entire life savings and purchased this valuable book. Understanding the need to preserve it, she then sold it at a much reduced price to the Bosch Institute in Stuttgart. It remains there to this day, one of the only examples of Hahnemann’s provings in his own handwriting, a remarkable find for an extraordinary homeopath.

Elvia Bury died on 11 August, 2022, aged 94.

A lengthy tribute to Bury was published in the Hermanus Village News, on 19 August 2022:

“This is not an obituary. It is a tribute to a most remarkable woman who lived amongst us and touched the lives of many who knew, loved and admired her, and many more who have benefited from her generosity without ever having met her.

Elvia didn’t like talking about herself; everything one gleaned of her amazing life story came in bits and pieces, in passing comments and casual references. It was like trying to construct a jigsaw puzzle without all the pieces.

Randomly, I got to know about her foray into dentistry and the years she spent sallying forth into deep rural KwaZulu-Natal to extract the teeth of people who could neither afford nor access professional dental services; then there was the extraordinary fact that she was one of the first female pilots in South Africa to obtain her wings, for which she was awarded a commemorative medal.

Most frequently she talked about her passion for homeopathy, not only on home soil, but in countries like Zambia, Malawi, Zimbabwe, Tanzania and others. Characteristically, she also once told me that not only humans, but dogs, too, responded well to homeopathic treatment, and that her two had consequently never once visited a vet.

Equally strong was her commitment to the education and development of under-resourced children and young people in the greater Overstrand community. She talked too, with pride of the story her grandfather had told her about his part in the Anglo-Zulu wars of the 19th century. He had arrived in this country as a young infantryman with the British Expeditionary Forces and ended up saving the life of a young Zulu prince on the battlefield.

When it came to getting a job done, Elvia allowed nothing to stand in her way. She remained undaunted to the end of her life. Her unquenchable curiosity and contagious enthusiasm will be remembered by all who knew her. Neither will they forget though that her diminutive size and softly-spoken manner belied an iron will. Not many people had the courage to say no to Elvia when she called upon them to get involved in one of her humanitarian crusades.

A strong spiritual groundedness, rather than religiosity, guided her in the projects she undertook, from her own training as a homeopathic doctor and Fellow of the British Institute of Homeopathy, to the establishment, when she was already in her 80s, of an African School of Homeopathy.

Until very recently, she continued to run regular training workshops there. She supported the people of the Chimanimani region of Zimbabwe when it was inundated by the floods of Cyclone Idai in 2019, collecting and sending vast quantities of clothing, household goods and homeopathic remedies to them.

In most of the causes she espoused, like the Christmas dinners that for many years she helped to organise and distribute to people who would never otherwise have enjoyed that luxury, she chose to remain in the background; indeed, like the true philanthropist she was, she was intensely engaged, but never in the limelight.

Elvia’s friend, Magriet Peter, Director of Enlighten Education Trust, wrote:

“Elvia Bury, loyal supporter and friend of Enlighten Education Trust will live on in our hearts. Her indomitable spirit inspired all of us over many years and will continue to do so.

“In memory of her late husband Alex Bury, she was instrumental in establishing the Enlighten Community Library, one of the Trust’s flagship projects and a child-filled hive of activity every single day.”

In December 2023, a podcast episode from Eugenie Kruger, remembering Elvia Bury, was published, featuring personal recollections of Elvia by her former student and colleague, homeopath Rebecca Sturgeon.

 

* With gratitude to Rebecca Sturgeon, Guy Bury, and Clever H! – The Mag, for their cooperation in creating this biography.

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Of Interest:

Markus Bury, son of Elvia Bury, is an Homoeopath.

Dr. Guy Bury, son of Elvia Bury, is an Homoeopath, practicing in Claremont, Cape Town, South Africa.