Humphry Davy’s Small Circle of Bristol Friends

22

BULLETIN OF ANESTHESIA HISTORY

Humphry Davy's Small Circle of Bristol Friends by AS. Wright* (Middle EastJ Anesth 13(3):233-278, 1 995) I hope you will proceed to supply the worldwith a new Materia Medica, to be drank in by the lungs. -Erasmus Darwin to James Watt, 17 August 1794. It could not therefore escape me that the pursuit might, in its own nature, be highly rational, and yet that those who first engaged in it, might never strike into the right path. . . It was plain that we might even prepare a happier era for mankind, and yet earn from the mass of our contemporaries nothing bet­ ter than the title of enthusiasts. -Thomas Beddoes, 1799. Thus, if the pleasurable effects, or medi­ cal properties of the nitrous oxide, should ever make it an article of general request, it may be procured with much less time, labour and expence, than most ofthe luxuries oflife. -Annals ofMedicine, 1 800, p. 232. In short, Mr. Davy's experiments, in place of exhausting the subject, have pointed out a new and most extensive field for future in­ vestigation. And while he has unquestionably very great merit in having paved the way for succeeding inquirers, we would fain hope, that he will not himselfdesert a pursuit which he has already prosecuted with so much suc­ cess, and so much honour. -Annals ofMedi­ cine, 1 800, p. 258. So, on we go, deciphering the world. Thomas Beddoes to James Watt, 20 June 1 807. Is certainty possible in life? Can one gain firm insight into the inside of bodies and minds? Does truth lie above or below the phenomenal tide? What is the connection between visible surface and invisible depth? These metaphor-laden questions are fundamental to an understanding of the yearning characterizing much of the eighteenth-century mentality. -Barbara Stafford, Body Criticism (1991), p. l . Pneuma t i c a l/Pneuma tick/Pneuma­ tology: adj., noun, moved by the wind; rela­ tive to the wind; consisting of spirit or wind. A branch ofmechanicks, which considers the doctrine of the air, or laws according to which that fluid is condensed, or gravities. In the schools, the doctrine of spiritual substances, Gods, angels, and the souls of men. The doc*MLS, Department of Anesthesiology Library, School of Medicine, University of Alabama at Bir­ mingham, 6 1 9 South 1 9th Street, Birmingham, Alabama 35233-6810, U.S.A.

trine of spiritual existence. (Reid) . -Dr. Johnson, Dictionmy. (Stafford,Body Criticism, p. 417) . Just a s a man lying sick with fever trans­ forms all the words which he hears into the extravagant images of delirium, so it is that the spirit of the present age seizes on the manifestations of past or distant spiritual worlds, in order to take possession of them and unfeelingly incorporate them into its own self-absorbed fantasizing. -Walter Ben­ jamin, TJ·auerspiel. On 17 April 1799, Humphry Davy, a 2 1 year-old employee at Thomas Beddoes' Medi­ cal Pneumatic Institution in Clifton, near Bristol, England, wrote a letter describing his successful respiration of nitrous oxide gas using apparatus designed for Beddoes by James Watt.! Davy's success with the gas ran counter to the work ofAmerican scientist and editor Samuel Latham Mitchill, who con­ tended that "nitrous oxide was the principle of contagion and capable of producing the most terrible effects when respired by ani­ mals in the minutest quantities or even when applied to the skin or a muscle fibre."2,3 Davy's nitrous oxide experiments in Clifton had begun in March 1 799 and would con­ tinue until mid-1 800; a number of individu­ als in the Bristol area aided Davy. A 580-page account of these efforts appeared in July 1800;4 this work has been described as "the most astonishing book in the history of ana­ esthesia, and one of the more astonishing in the whole history of medicine."5 The story of nitrous oxide began when Joseph Priestley, a political liberal, dissent­ ing minister and prolific author with an in­ terest in science, drifted into chemical experi­ mentation because little expense was in­ volved.6 His early apparatus consisted mostly of common household implements; later, ce­ ramic tubes, dishes and retorts were made for him by his friend and supporter Josiah Wedgwood,1,8 Priestley met Wedgwood, along with other notables such as James Watt and Matthew Boulton, via his membership in the Lunar Society.9,10 . In the summer of 1 773 Priestley became librarian and intellectual companion to Wil­ liam, Lord Shelburne. For the next seven years he used his liberal free time and mod­ est equipment to continue experiments he had begun in 1770 on different kinds of "airs" or gases, including oxygen, carbon dioxide, nitrogen dioxide and nitrous oxide. This work

resulted in a series of publications, includ­ ing Experiments and Observations on Diferent Kinds ofAil; issued in six volumes between 1 774 and 1 786,u Much of Priestley's mono­ graphic work was published by prominent London bookseller and publisher Joseph Johnson, whose firm issued a number of other medical and scientific treatises, including Davy's nitrous oxide book,12-!4 Priestley conducted his experiments in a time of rising expectations for chemistry. "These researches were closely linked with human welfare through the scheme of medi­ cal meteorology-restoration ofrespirable air and its variation in quality governed the physiological fate of the human and the so­ cial frame . . . Respirability elided into dephlogistication, dephlogistication into health, health into virtue."!5 Reviewing some recent histories of science, Golinski notes, "These accounts suggest that the enhanced status of chemistry in the eighteenth century depended upon a widespread perception of its 'utility.' Because it was seen as having ap­ plications in fields such as agriculture, medi­ cine, metallurgy, mining, bleaching and dye­ ing, chemistry was accorded prestige and in­ terest in Enlightenment Europe."!6 A recent demographic study of science indicates that something like 12.6 percent of scientists in the second halfof the eighteenth century were chemists, making them the largest group of specialists.!7 In 1 775 Marsilio Landriani, an Italian scientist familiar with translations of Priestley's work, built an instrument based on a test of Priestley's. This instrument, an eudiometer, measured the goodness or "vir­ tue" of "airs" and "would be accurate, por­ table and, [Landriani] claimed, revolution­ ary." !8 Priestley's friends Wedgwood and in­ dustrialist Matthew Boulton helped him manufacture and market this device in En­ gland; "from 1777 eudiometers were on sale at a fashionable cutglass factory in London's West End." !8 Priestley moved quickly to prac­ tical applications for this "pneumatic" tech­ nology. He proposed to test "airs" collected from various locations, including Boulton's factories and "rooms at Shelburne's house after gatherings there. Vials of air were sent round the kingdom; the test began to engross the social world. In the early 1780s Priestley collaborated with the reforming farming jour­ nalist Arthur Young on a general survey of the eudiometric characteristics of waters in different agricultural regions . . . This mix-

BULLETIN OF ANESTHESIA HISTORY

ture of utility, technology and pneumatics won adherents."19 Priestley was confident about another practical use of pneumatics. "I cannot help flattering myself," he wrote, "that, in time, very great medicinal use will be made of the application of these different kinds of air to the animal system. Let ingenious physicians attend to this subject, and endeavour to lay hold of the new handle which is now pre­ sented them, before it be seized by rash empiricks . . ."20 Among the "ingenious" in­ dividuals who answered Priestley's call were Royal Society Fellow Tiberius Cavallo;21,22 Richard Pearson;23 Charles Brown;24 Loftus WOOd;25 and Dr. John Ewart of Bath, who tried oxygen in the treatment of tumors.26 Another "ingenious" physician who took up Priestley's challenge was Thomas Beddoes. Beddoes is surely one of the most fascinating individuals in the history ofmedi­ cine, one as complex-and prolific-as Priestley himself, and one who "was among the very first to see that with its roots in chem­ istry, medicine could become a more precise art."27 Two recent biographies have finally updated the only previous such work, pub­ lished just three years after Beddoes' death in 1 808.28-30 This complicated genius, who "had no intellectual heirs,"31 has thus been rescued from being merely the man who dis­ covered Humphry Davy and given his right­ ful place as one of the more important intel­ lects of his age. By the time he died at age 48, Beddoes' achievements were spread over a range as­ tonishing even for his era. After under­ graduate and graduate work at Oxford, he studied medicine in Edinburgh for three years where his instructors included chemist Joseph Black, associate ofJames Watt and the discoverer of carbon dioxide; and then he spent time in France. His acquaintances there included Lavoisier, who was incorporating Priestley's work into a new system of chem­ istry. By 1788 Beddoes was a reader in chem­ istry at Oxford; some accounts contend he quickly became the most popular lecturer there since the thirteenth century. The steady stream of books and pamphlets that so char­ acterized his last two decades began in 1 784 with translations of chemical and other sci­ entific works by Spallanzani, Bergman and Scheele. While teaching at Oxford, Beddoes devel­ oped three interests beyond chemistry that would determine the course of his life from that time-the French Revolution, educa­ tional theory and public health. Porter asserts that "In the l 790s, Beddoes was a fiery radi­ cal. I do not believe his radicalism ever di­ minished. His expectations of rapid and im­ minent political improvement did not, how-

ever, last beyond about 1 795. He became a very disappointed man."32 Stansfield charac­ terizes Beddoes as "hot-headed and incau­ tious."33 On October 9, 1792, Beddoes' sym­ pathy for the French Revolution burst into print in the form of a broadside that gave "an impassioned defence of the Revolutionary government in France. It [was] also quite openly an attack on the English government for whipping up enmity against France by. . . 'fabricated lies' as Beddoes rashly [called] the official accounts."34 Beddoes was condemned to a member of Parliament for "sowing sedi­ tion" and by April 1 793 had departed Oxford "marked as a revolutionary."35 After he moved to Bristol, his revolutionary fervor reappeared in several other publications in the mid-1790s, including attacks on Prime Min­ ister William Pitt.36-40 Two of this group were issued in 1 796 by Joseph Johnson, the Lon­ don publisher. As a result of this situation, Beddoes lost the opportunity to be first occu­ pant of Oxford's Regius chair in chemistry.41 Beddoes' twin interests in education and public health and reform generally first took shape in a 1 792 essay which was printed but never issued to the publicY That work, ''A Letter to a Lady on the Subject of Early In­ struction, Particularly that of the Poor," sug­ gests specific reading material by several au­ thors including Thomas Day and Mrs. Anna Laetitia Aikin Barbauld. Barbauld was the daughter of Dr. John Aikin, a fellow tutor of Priestley's at Warrington Academy when Priestley taught there in the mid-1760s. She "was first inspired by Dr. Priestley to try her hand at poetry, and acted the part of the poet laureate to the Academy."43 A feature com­ mon to the theories of Beddoes and Barbauld was the notion that learning should be re­ lated to the child's experience, "the impor­ tance of imagination as it arises from the senses."44 The next year Beddoes published HistOlY oflsaccJenkins, a fictional tale that ex­ posed the evils of drunkenness but in a man­ ner free from "condescension and from ex­ horta tion. "45 While at Oxford in the late 1 780s, Beddoes observed in understatement that he met "in­ teresting and welcoming people in Birming­ ham," including Erasmus Darwin, another physician with an interest in science, and James Keir, an industrialist and chemist. These two men were members of the Lunar Society, a loose confederation of intellectu­ als, scientists and businessmen that also in­ cluded Thomas Day, Richard Lovell Edgeworth, Josiah Wedgwood, James Watt and his partner in steam-engine develop­ ment, Matthew Boulton. Lunar Society his­ torian Schofield contends "that the Lunar Society represented an eighteenth-century technological research organiza tion. It would

23

b e hard t o find a single activity, of either the science or the technology of the eighteenth century, in which more than one Lunar Soci­ ety member cannot be found to have been involved-usuallywith an attempt to turn his knowledge to practical advantage. "46 Beddoes' own Pneumatic Institution of the late 1790s seems almost a more formal at­ tempt to replicate this model. The Lunar Society's interest in the prac­ tical application ofscientific discoveries must have influenced Beddoes' thinking about potential medical uses of Priestley's "facti­ tious airs." But his initial experience with gases came at Oxford via his acquaintance with balloonist James Sadler, whom Beddoes described as "the son of a pastry cook of this place, a perfect prodigy in mechanics. "47 Phy­ sicians were not the only group experiment­ ing with Priestley's "factitious airs." Balloon­ ists were using them too; by 1 782, Joseph Montgolfier of France had developed a hot air balloon. In June 1783 he and his brother Etienne made the first public balloon ascent at Annonay.48 Even Watt and Boulton tried a balloon experiment in Birmingham in 1 784.49 On October 4 of the following year, Sadler became the first Englishman to conduct a balloon ascent when his craft rose 3600 feet into the morning air over Oxford.50 Sadler's balloon exploits continued with several more ascents the following month and year. Sadler returned to ballooning with chemist William. Clayfield in 1 81 0;51,52 he was killed on Sep­ tember 29, 1 824, when high winds forced his descending balloon into a chimney. S adler was thrown from the car and died instantly.53 Sadler developed air pumps, stoves and ba­ rometers for use with balloon gases; by 1790 he seems to have been designing apparatus for Beddoes' chemistry lectures.54 Sadler would leave Oxford with Beddoes and accom­ panied him to Bristol in 1 794. In 1 792 Beddoes first published his clini­ cal application of the basic research of Priestley and Lavoisier in a work covering several diseases, including scurvy and con­ sumption.55 Quickly following was a second, more explicit work, addressed to Erasmus Darwin, in which Beddoes described "a new mode of treating pulmonary consumption."56 This publication became so well-known that an anonymous parody appeared in 1 794. Written in the style of Darwin, who often wrote in poetic form, the work unwittingly describes Beddoes in terms that today sound more prophetic than satiric: Eternal war with dulness born to wage, Thou Paracelsus of this woundrous age; Continued on Next Page

24

BULLETIN OF ANESTHESIA HISTORY

Davy. .

. Continued from Page 23

Beddoes, the philosophic Chymist's Guide, The Bigot's Scourge, of Democrat's the Pride. . .57 Perhaps authored by one of Beddoes' former Oxford colleagues, this work contin­ ues the kind of parody directed at Priestley by caricaturist James Gillray and poet George Canning from which Humphry Davy would also suffer after his move to the Royal Insti­ tution in London in 1 80 l .58-6o Such support­ ers of the Crown subjected their enemies to unremitting attack; and eventually chemistry lectures alone became subjects of these works.6 1 Beddoes' Letter to DI: Dmwin is also an important hint ofevents to come at the Pneu­ matic Institution . This work describes Beddoes' self-experiments during which he breathed a combination of oxygen and nitro­ gen between 20 and 60 minutes a day for · seven weeks. These experiments were ob­ served by William Reynolds, the inventor son of an industrialist who had met Beddoes early in the latter's Oxford teaching period and who provided a home for Beddoes for a few months before he moved to Bristol. Reynolds' half-brother Joshua and a Dr. Yonge were also present at these experiments.62

Thus the stage was set for Beddoes' move to Bristol and even greater fame---or infamy, as some of his contemporaries viewed him. Ifpossible, the pace of his life quickened even more as he moved into the seaport's society, developed a private medical practice and be­ gan to formulate concrete plans for the Pneu­ matic Institution. In the midst of this whirl­ wind of activity, Beddoes spent eight years between 1 793 and 1 80 1 reviewing new medi­ cal works, including some by John Hunter and Benjamin Rush, for the Whig journal The Monthly Review, edited in London by Ralph Griffiths. Thus, in addition to his own medi­ cal research, Beddoes remained aware of new work by others. Anna Barbauld and her fa­ ther were .also reviewers for this publication during the same period.63 Beddoes no doubt chose Bristol as his new base because of the Hotwells, a hot springs resort near Clifton, a small town on the cliffs above Bristol and the river Avon.64 The Hotwells drew a stream of sick but wealthy people, and Beddoes rightly guessed a prof­ itable medical practice could be developed there. Richard Lovell Edgeworth, the Lunar Society member, was living in Bristol with his second wife and large family at the time Beddoes arrived. Edgeworth hoped the resort would help his tubercular son Lovell. Beddoes was introduced to Edgeworth by

Bulletin of Anesthesia History C . Ronald Stephen, M.D., C .M., Newsletter Editor 1 5 8 0 1 Harris Ridge Court Chesterfield, MO 630 1 7 U . S .A.

another Society member, James Keir. In ad­ dition to his other achievements, Keir was Thomas Day's biographer.65 Day, who had died in 1 789, was one ofthe educational theo­ rists whom Beddoes had come to admire­ and a friend of Edgeworth's and fellow Soci­ ety member.66,67 Edgeworth aided Beddoes' entry into Bristol and Clifton society. Edgeworth's daughter, novelist Maria Edgeworth, de­ scribed the process: "When Dr. Beddoes came to Clifton with a view to setting up as a phy­ sician, Mr. Keir gave him a letter of introduc­ tion to my father, who was, I believe, his first acquaintance there. My father admired his abilities, was eager to cultivate his society; and this intimacy continuing some months he had opportunities of assisting in establish­ ing the doctor at Clifton."68 Beddoes soon became engaged to another of Edgeworth's daughters, Anna; and they were married at the family's ancestral home in Ireland in April 1 794. Signing the affidavit were Lovell and Maria Edgeworth and Reverend George Keating.69

T his article will be continued in the next issue of the

Bulletin ofAnesthesia History.