Floral Acupuncture or The Bloodless Revolution

Floral Acupuncture: Applying the Flower Essences of Dr. Bach to Acupuncture Sites

Author: Deborah Craydon

DEBORAH CRAYDON is a flower essence practitioner and the president of Flora Corona, a producer of Californian and Hawaiian flower essences, gem elixirs, and light elixirs. She lives with her family in Mount Shasta, California.
WARREN BELLOWS is a licensed acupuncturist and has a private practice where he has a studenttraining program. He lives in Sebastopol, California.

Books about: Massage with Aromatherapy or Control High Blood Pressure Without Drugs

The Bloodless Revolution: A Cultural History of Vegetarianism from 1600 to Modern Times

Author: Tristram Stuart

"Magnificently detailed and wide-ranging."—Steven Shapin, The New Yorker

Hailed by critics on both sides of the Atlantic, The Bloodless Revolution is a pioneering history of puritanical revolutionaries, European Hinduphiles, and visionary scientists who embraced radical ideas from the East and conspired to overthrow Western society's voracious hunger for meat. At the heart of this compelling history are the stories of John Zephaniah Holwell, survivor of the Black Hole of Calcutta, and John Stewart and John Oswald, who traveled to India in the eighteenth century, converted to the animal-friendly tenets of Hinduism, and returned to Europe to spread the word. Leading figures of the Enlightenment—among them Rousseau, Voltaire, and Benjamin Franklin—gave intellectual backing to the vegetarians, sowing the seeds for everything from Victorian soup kitchens to contemporary animal rights and environmentalism.

Spanning across three centuries with reverberations to our current world, The Bloodless Revolution is a stunning debut from a young historian with enormous talent and promise, "draw[ing] the different strands of the subject together in a way that has never been done before" (Keith Thomas, author of Man and the Natural World). 24 pages of illustrations.

The Washington Post - Mark Kurlansky

Tristram Stuart's thought-provoking book is not a global history of this taboo. Instead, it revolves around the vegetarian movement that began in 17th-century England -- the name first came into use in the 1840s -- and that remains strong today. But there is nothing narrow about the author's focus. Both scholarly and entertaining, The Bloodless Revolution is a huge feast of ideas -- ideas from India and France and America, from ancient Greece and Thoreau and Emerson, from Rousseau, Hobbes, the Kabbalah, the Old Testament, Descartes and Darwin, to name just a few of the better-known sources that weigh in on the meatless diet.

Publishers Weekly

The word "vegetarian" wasn't coined until the 1840s, but Stuart's magisterial social history demonstrates how deeply seated the vegetarian impulse has been in Western culture since the 17th century. Thinkers such as Francis Bacon and Thomas Bushell contended that a vegetarian diet provided a key not only to long life but also to spiritual perfection: God had permitted Adam and Eve to eat only plants, fruits and seeds, and doing so could restore humankind to Edenic wholeness with nature. Seventeenth- and 18th-century travelers to India introduced the Hindu idea of ahimsa (the preservation of all life) as an ideal for a slaughter-free society. Stuart follows the development of vegetarianism through its Romantic proponents Shelley and Rousseau and on into the 19th century, when doctors proffered scientific evidence that human teeth and intestines were more similar to those of herbivores than of carnivores. Looking at literary culture, Stuart notes that Samuel Richardson, Mary Shelley and Jane Austen included vegetarian characters in their novels. Stuart offers a masterful social and cultural history of a movement that changed the ways people think about the food they eat. 24 pages of color illus., b&w illus. throughout. (Jan.) Copyright 2006 Reed Business Information.

Kristin Whitehair - Library Journal

In his first book, historian and freelance writer Stuart explores the advocacy of vegetarianism by numerous individuals and groups in the West from 1600 to the present. Examining various vegetarian practices, he identifies common trends and beliefs while doing important work in highlighting connections between vegetarian advocates and political and social trends. Stuart also profiles influential individuals in the movement, providing historical context; for example, he thoroughly examines the beliefs and impact of 18th-century British vegetarian George Cheyne. Overall, this work is extensively researched and includes detailed descriptions of ideological arguments advocating vegetarianism. Though Stuart himself does not aim to promote vegetarianism, a pro-vegetarian viewpoint is evident throughout. With 24 pages of color illustrations; suitable for undergraduate and graduate readers.

Kirkus Reviews

An epic of non-carnivorous restraint. Stuart, a young British scholar, offers portraits of often little-known figures who would not eat anything with a mother or a face, and he blends these character studies with smart analyses of historical trends and the transmission of ideas. The earliest vegetarians in this account, from the 17th century, were mostly driven by religious ideas, though often with a strong scientific bent. For instance, Thomas Bushell, a disciple of the natural philosopher Francis Bacon, reasoned that, according to the Bible, humans lived to be 900 years old until after the Flood, when God gave them permission to eat meat, after which they started dying off at age 70; logic demanded that vegetarians therefore could live, if not to 900, to at least some greater age. To Judeo-Christian religious impulses, complicated by widespread contact with Hindu and other Indian ideas after the 17th century, were added ethical and proto-ecological arguments, with some maintaining that it was simply wrong to eat things that demonstrably had consciousness, and that creating feed for livestock was a wanton waste of natural resources. All these arguments are with us today, Stuart notes. Along the way, he identifies founding fathers of the self-help movement, including perhaps the first diet doctor in history. He looks into the ideas of Jean-Jacques Rousseau, moved by the rigor of Linnean science to argue that because women had only two breasts, as compared to, say, a wolf's many teats, our kind is likely not innately carnivorous: "Breasts," writes Stuart, "were not just symbols of gentle nourishment and innocence, they bore scientific testimony to humanity's original herbivorous nature."And he examines the effects of Darwinian theory on various strains of vegetarian thought, one of them the ideology propounded by Adolf Hitler, who seems to have thought that eating meat could "purify" him of any Jewishness flowing through his veins. Culinary and cultural history intertwined: readable, and endlessly interesting.

Table of Contents:

List of Illustrations     ix
Acknowledgements     xv
Introduction     xvii
Grass Roots
Bushell's Bushel, Bacon's Bacon and The Great Instauration     3
John Robins: The Shakers' God     15
Roger Crab: Levelling the Food Chain     26
Pythagoras and the Sages of India     39
'This proud and troublesome Thing, called Man': Thomas Tryon, the Brahmin of Britain     60
John Evelyn: Salvation in a Salad     78
The Kabbala Stripped Naked     89
Men should be Friends even to Brute Beasts: Isaac Newton and the Origins of Pagan Theology     97
Atheists, Deists and the Turkish Spy     115
Meatless Medicine
Dieting with Dr Descartes     131
Tooth and Nail: Pierre Gassendi and the Human Appendix     138
The Mitre and the Microscope: Philippe Hecquet's Catholic Fast Food     151
Dr Cheyne's Sensible Diet     163
Clarissa's Calories     181
Rousseau and the Bosoms of Nature     194
The Counter-Vegetarian Mascot: Pope's Happy Lamb     215
Antonio Cocchi and the Cure for Scurvy     227
The Sparing Diet: Scotland's Vegetarian Dynasty     236
Romantic Dinners
Diet and Diplomacy: EatingBeef in the Land of the Holy Cow     259
John Zephaniah Holwell: Voltaire's Hindu Prophet     275
The Cry of Nature: Killing in the Name of Animal Rights in the French Revolution     295
The Marquis de Valady faces the Guillotine     313
Bloodless Brothers     331
John 'Walking' Stewart and the Utility of Death     347
To Kill a Cat: Joseph Ritson's Politics of Atheism     361
Shelley and The Return to Nature     372
The Malthusian Tragedy: Feeding the World     399
Epilogue. Vegetarianism and the Politics of Ecology: Thoreau, Gandhi and Hitler     418
Abbreviations     448
Bibliography     450
Notes     518
Index     608