Tom Bowen

Thomas Ambrose Bowen was born in 1916 in Brunswick, Victoria, Australia to a pair of recent emigrants from England who ran their house with a strong emphasis on charity and community involvement. From a young age, Tom expressed a desire to study medicine and become a doctor, but in his family none of the children were educated beyond what was necessary to gain employment as a physical laborer. Throughout his life, Tom was employed as a general hand and laborer in a number of different industries, but it was his side interests and hobbies that would come to define his life’s work.

Tom was very athletic and was consistently involved in his community as a coach and trainer to young people in a variety of different sports. Helping his athletes recover from sports injuries was one of the earliest inspirations for the development of his skills as a healer. What’s more, at the age of 25, Tom was married to Jessie McLean who suffered from severe asthma and whose suffering he worked tirelessly to relieve. Tom had no formal training whatsoever as a healer and, when asked about the development of his technique, he commonly claimed that it was a “gift from God.”

The truth is that Tom was blessed with an extraordinarily sensitive set of hands that allowed him to feel even the smallest structures of the body and, he claimed, the movement of electrical impulses through the nervous system; but he also studied extensively in every textual resource he could find as well as regularly meeting with other practitioners such as Ernie Saunders, a physical manipulator from Melbourne, as well as with a pharmacist from Queensland, and quite probably with a Chinese doctor from Geelong where Tom was living at the time. More than studying, the greatest influence on Tom’s technique as a healer was hands on experience.

Tom volunteered his services to many people in his community especially his coworkers at the Geelong Cement Works and the athletes he coached. Through this extensive practice, he developed a keen eye for diagnosis as well as a firm understanding of how to address any issue presented by his clients. By 1957, when Tom opened his first clinic in coworker Stan Horwood’s front room, he already had an immense body of experience as a healer, and his reputation grew quickly. With the help of Rene Horwood, Stan Horwood’s widow and Tom’s business manager, he moved his clinic to a better location and rapidly built a bustling practice. in order to avoid the registration requirements of the Victorian Government, Tom practiced under the title Osteopath.

Then, in 1973, the law was changed and he was denied registration by the Academy of Osteopaths for his refusal to give rote answers to oral examinations and despite his excellent performance on all the practical examinations. Tom went on practicing without an official registration, and in 1975 he was found to be helping an astounding 13,000 people a year as documented over a 27 week period by the Victorian Government Webb report. What is truly amazing is that this was accomplished without any advertising but word of mouth. Tom’s greatest regret over not being registered was that his patients were not eligible to receive insurance coverage for his treatments, but he dealt with this by simply giving treatments to those that he knew could not afford them. As Tom’s reputation spread, a number of different men, including physical therapists, osteopaths, and chiropractors approached Tom in hope of learning his methods.

Tom never documented any of his techniques and his students had to learn simply by observing him practice. Six of his students separately endeavored to document his methods and each came up with a slightly different technique. One student in particular, Oswald Rentsch, with Tom’s blessing and not until after Tom’s death in 1982, began teaching others what he had learned from Tom.