We prefer our history of science as a series of eureka moments plotted along a steady march of progress. In reality the story of scientific discovery resembles the staggering gait of a drunken sot looking for a familiar door with the wrong key. The tale of Thomas Beddoes is a classic example, as Mike Jay’s vivid biography so poignantly demonstrates.

The Shropshire-born son of a tanner, Beddoes (1760-1808) was a brilliant polymath, who trained in medicine and specialised in the emerging new science of chemistry. His lectures on the subject at Oxford were packed. A fervent humanitarian, who was inspired by the heady ideals of the French revolution, the affable Dr Beddoes was forced to quit his university post early when his name appeared on a Home Office list of undesirables.

Undeterred, Beddoes gathered around him a dazzling circle of like-minded artists and scientists, including the poets Robert Southey and Samuel Taylor Coleridge, and the Lunar Society luminaries Erasmus Darwin and James Watt. At the hub of an alternative society centred on Bristol, Beddoes attracted two devoted protégées, a former student called Davies Giddy and the exuberant young Humphry Davy.

Together, this promising coterie developed a grand vision of providing free healthcare to the poor of the south-west in a pioneering medical research centre. Sadly, for posterity and the Bristol poor, the treatment offered at Dr Beddoes’ Pneumatic Institution in the dying days of the 18th century consisted almost exclusively, and completely ineffectually, of inhaling assorted gases.

Convinced that gas therapy could cure the scourge of consumption and other ills, Beddoes persuaded thousands of patients to undergo his treatment in a series of exhaustive experiments. Funded by rich subscribers including the Duke and Duchess of Devonshire, using apparatus designed by Watt, Beddoes and his disciples administered oxygen, nitrogen and carbon dioxide to queues of ailing hopefuls.

When the ‘gaseous medicine’ failed to save Watt’s consumptive daughter, along with countless others, from a long and painful death, the researchers were only impelled to redouble their efforts. Encouraged by his mentor, the unstoppable Davy isolated nitrous oxide and tested its effects on himself, his friends and streams of eager volunteers.

The results were, literally, intoxicating. Inhaling nitrous oxide – or laughing gas as it soon became known – transported Davy and his recruits to unimagined heights of exhilaration, sensory awareness and, ultimately, unconsciousness. Yet despite their tantalising asides that nitrous oxide dulled pain and might conceivably be used in surgery, the experimenters failed utterly to realise the revolutionary implications of their discovery as an anaesthetic. That would have to wait another 50 years until, observing the numbing effects of laughing gas at carnival sideshows, an American dentist tested its use in removing a tooth.

Finally abandoning his ambitions for pneumatic medicine, Beddoes turned his talents more successfully to championing health education among his impoverished patients, while his disciples, Davy and Giddy (who changed his name to Gilbert), well and truly eclipsed him as successive presidents of the Royal Society. The team’s youthful antics with laughing gas served only as ammunition for satirists lampooning the experimenters in a burst of explosive flatulence.

Diligently researched and engagingly told, Jay’s book illuminates fascinating times although it is hard to know whether to laugh or cry at his farcical tale.

The Atmosphere of Heaven: The Unnatural Experiments of Dr Beddoes and his Sons of Genius by Mike Jay
Yale University Press, £20 Buy the book

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