Flesh in the Age of Reason (62 page)

While resident in Bristol in the 1790s, Coleridge’s physician was Thomas Beddoes, a mere bit player in Britain’s cultural history, yet one whose symbolic role confirms the deep ambiguities in this story. Beddoes exposed, and was a fierce critic of, dependency as a disease of society: as we saw in
Chapter 13
, he abhorred the new chic lifestyles and the cant that accompanied them. Yet he was himself an ardent experimenter with new chemicals and gases, testing their medical and psychotropic effects. He distrusted doctors, yet commended them as the hope of the future. Another disciple of Lockean sensationalism, associationism, Hartleyan materialism and Brunonian medicine, he embraced sublime hopes for the perfectibility of man, yet his life ended in despair.

Born into a prosperous Shropshire tradesman’s family in 1760, Thomas Beddoes typified the West Midlands character: thrusting, businesslike and ambitious. Trusting to his own energies and resenting tradition and privilege, he grew up a tenacious liberal individualist, dreaming of a society with room at the top. He proceeded
in 1776 to Oxford and, unusually for the time, cultivated scientific interests. Opting for medicine, on obtaining his BA he migrated to London, the premier centre for practical medicine, moving on in 1784 to Edinburgh to complete his medical education. There he forged a lasting friendship with the chemist Joseph Black, friend of Erasmus Darwin and the Lunar circle.

In 1786 he returned to Oxford, throwing himself into chemical research. Bursting with energy, Beddoes widened his horizons and started to publish. His scientific contacts grew; warm friendships burgeoned with Erasmus Darwin, James Watt and other Lunar Society members. And in a bold move, in 1787 he took a summer jaunt to France, which led to his embracing the new French chemistry.

Breasting 30, he was at the peak of his potential. The young scientist naturally welcomed the French Revolution with open arms. Down with tyranny, oppression, priestcraft! A new age was at hand – of liberty, the rights of man, and government by the people.

Beddoes became a political activist: his letters to his old college friend Davies Giddy reveal him sporting a tricolour, singing revolutionary songs and cheering universal liberty. The sunny libertarian skies soon turned stormy, however. With an anti-revolutionary groundswell growing in his Alma Mater, his radicalism attracted enemies. The Birmingham Riots of July 1791, in which loyalist Church and King mobs torched the library and laboratory of Joseph Priestley, shocked him, for Beddoes surely identified himself as Priestley junior. The Home Office was having him watched.

Jumping before he was pushed, Beddoes quit Oxford in 1793, migrating to the Bristol suburb of Clifton, where he set up in medical practice and, shortly afterwards, married Anna, the daughter of his Lunar Society friend Richard Lovell Edgeworth. Bristol was a congenial hotbed of intellectual radicalism, and the years from 1794 to 1797 brought ardent involvement in political campaigning, journalism and pamphleteering, above all, with the young Robert Southey and with Coleridge.

These were at first heady and then also terrible times. Beddoes grew uneasy about the Revolution itself. Unlike Coleridge and
Southey, his radicalism remained but it inevitably turned defensive, defending supporters of the rights of man even as he deplored the politics of the guillotine. He denounced government policy at home, especially its suspension of Habeas Corpus in 1793 and the ‘Gagging Acts’ of 1795 that restricted freedom of speech and assembly and, through a flurry of anti-Pitt pamphlets, he won his spurs as a polemicist.

For a few years, Beddoes spearheaded democratic resistance in a radical city. Thereafter the stuffing went out of protest, and he grew politically quieter and perhaps demoralized, though his anti-Establishment sentiments never wavered. Meanwhile he had other fish to fry, for a new age was dawning, not just in politics but in science. Exhilarating breakthroughs in gas chemistry, above all the discovery of oxygen, were sure to transform science and also produce astonishing medical advances. Works like
Considerations on the Medicinal Use of Factitious Airs
(1794) published his researches into a range of diseases.

Touting the applicability of the new gas chemistry to respiratory disorders, Beddoes predicted in 1793 that ‘from chemistry, which is daily unfolding the profoundest secrets of nature’, hopes could be entertained for ‘a safe and efficacious remedy for one of the most frequent painful and hopeless of diseases’, that is, consumption (tuberculosis) – a disease called by Erasmus Darwin a ‘giant malady’. Inspired by late-Enlightenment optimism, he foresaw that ‘however remote medicine may at present be from such perfection’, there was no reason to doubt that ‘the same power will be acquired over living, as is at present exercised over some inanimate bodies’. Chemistry thus portended a medical millennium. ‘In a future letter’, he informed his Lunar Society friend Erasmus Darwin,

I hope to present you with a catalogue of diseases in which I have effected a cure.… And if you do not, as I am almost sure you do not, think it absurd to suppose the organization of man equally susceptible of improvement from culture with that of various animals and vegetables, you will agree with me in entertaining hopes not only of a beneficial change in the practice of medicine, but in the constitution of human nature itself.

The gases upon which Beddoes pinned his medical millennium were oxygen and nitrous oxide. Oxygen was believed to be beneficial in scrofula, ulcers, dyspepsia, opium poisoning and so forth. As for nitrous oxide, its story began with Joseph Priestley, another man confident of the practical value of pneumatic chemistry. ‘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.’ In the mid-1790s, Priestley’s friend James Watt administered gases both to himself and others in Birmingham. ‘My asthma seems to have entirely left me as well as the spasm in my breast, I believe the former was cured by some small doses of H. C. [hydrocarbonate].’

Support grew. Back in 1794 Tom Wedgwood had agreed to help Beddoes to the tune of a thousand pounds. A wealthy patient, Lord Lambton, also assisted Beddoes financially, as did Erasmus Darwin. And soon after, Humphry Davy burst on the scene.

Born in Penzance in December 1778, the oldest son of a woodcarver, in 1794 young Davy was apprenticed to John Bingham Borlase, a local apothecary-surgeon. While an apprentice he began an ambitious plan of self-education that included physics and chemistry. In the winter of 1797 another of Watt’s sons, Gregory, visited Cornwall seeking relief for tuberculosis and boarded with the Davy family. At about the same time Davy met and impressed Davies Giddy, Beddoes’ old Oxford friend. When Beddoes sought a laboratory assistant for the Pneumatic Institution, Davy was highly recommended. On 2 October 1798 he left Penzance, and nine days later he was reporting ‘new and wonderful events’ to his mother:

… Dr Beddoes, who between you and me, is one of the most original men I ever saw – uncommonly short and fat, with little elegance of manners, and nothing characteristic externally of genius or science; extremely silent, and, in a few words, a very bad companion. Mrs Beddoes is the reverse of Dr Beddoes – extremely cheerful, gay, and witty; she is one of the most pleasing women I ever met with. We are already very great friends. She has taken me to see all the fine scenery about Clifton; for the Doctor, from his occupations and his bulk, is unable to walk much.

The nitrous oxide experiments Davy began at the Pneumatic Institution in spring 1799 were daring indeed, especially as the American experimenter Samuel Latham Mitchill had contended that this gas (then called gaseous oxyd of azote or ‘septon’) was the cause of most infectious diseases, perhaps even bubonic plague. The bold Bristol pair were prepared to test this theory, on themselves and others.

Davy worked incessantly for ten months and his findings were written up as
Researches, Chemical and Philosophical; Chiefly Concerning Nitrous Oxide, or Dephlogisticated Nitrous Air, and Its Respiration
(1800). His first experiments were made with impure nitrous oxide which he breathed mixed with air and oxygen, and he found the effect depressing, with a tendency towards giddiness and a slowing of the pulse. By April he had obtained the pure gas. On 16 April he inhaled three quarts, which produced ‘a fullness of the heart accompanied by loss of distinct sensation and of voluntary power, a feeling analogous to that produced in the first stage of intoxication’. On the following day, he breathed four quarts from and into a silk bag with his nose closed, and in half a minute the sensations of the previous day ‘were succeeded by a sensation analogous to gentle pressure on all the muscles, attended by a highly pleasurable thrilling, particularly in the chest and extremities… towards the last inspirations the thrilling increased, the sense of muscular power became greater, and at last an irresistible propensity to action was indulged in’. The gas left no hangover. Later, Davy reported another experiment:

By degrees as the pleasurable sensations increased, I lost all connection with external things; trains of vivid visible images rapidly passed through my mind and were connected with words in such a manner, as to produce perceptions perfectly novel. I existed in a world of newly connected and newly modified ideas. I theorised; I imagined that I made discoveries. When I was awakened from this semi-delirious trance by Dr Kinglake… I endeavoured to recall the ideas, they were feeble and indistinct; one collection of terms, however, presented itself: and with the most intense belief and prophetic manner, I exclaimed to Dr Kinglake, ‘
Nothing exists but thoughts! – the universe is composed of impressions, ideas, pleasures and pains!
’

The experiments created a great stir. On 5 June Southey told Grosvenor Bedford, an old boyhood friend: ‘I am going to breathe some wonder-working gas, which excites all possible mental and muscular energy, and induces almost a delirium of pleasurable sensations without any subsequent dejection.’ Next month he rhapsodized to his brother:

Oh, Tom! such a gas has Davy discovered, the gaseous oxyd. Oh, Tom! I have had some; it made me laugh and tingle in every toe and finger-tip. Davy has actually invented a new pleasure, for which language has no name.… Tom, I am sure the air in heaven must be this wonder-working gas of delight!

As high as heaven.

Beddoes persuaded a brave young lady to breathe the gas:

to the astonishment of everybody, [she] dashed out of the room and house, when, racing down Hope-square, she leaped over a great dog in her way, but being hotly pursued by the fleetest of her friends, the fair fugitive, or rather the temporary maniac, was at length overtaken and secured, without further damage.

Coleridge himself finally breathed the gas after his return from Germany in July 1799. On his first bagful, ‘the only motion which I felt inclined to make, was that of laughing at those who were looking at me’. After the third time, when ‘the mouthpiece was removed, I remained for a few seconds motionless, in great extacy’. The final try produced ‘more unmingled pleasure than I had ever before experienced’. ‘I felt as if composed of finely vibrating strings,’ proclaimed Beddoes on one occasion.

The rest is history. In March 1801 Humphry Davy, at the invitation of Count Rumford, accepted an appointment as Professor of Chemistry at the Royal Institution in London. Seven years later Beddoes died, worn out at the age of 48, sad and despondent, ‘as one who has scattered abroad the
avena fatua
[wild oats] of knowledge, from which neither branch nor blossom nor fruit has resulted’. It is sobering to ponder those two erstwhile allies, Coleridge and Beddoes, in their
later days. Coleridge was in the throes of an addiction crisis which steered him into reactionary doctrines. Beddoes was experimenting with more mind-influencing drugs – self-experimentation, it has been suggested, contributed to the heart and lungs complaints which shortened his life. Neither seems to have resolved very happily the problems of private and public identities.

Meanwhile conservative satirists made merry with these visions of mankind given a new ‘constitution’ through gas – was radicalism not all a load of air? In a satire of 1798 on Erasmus Darwin’s
The Loves of the Plants
, the
Anti-Jacobin Review
mocked fatuous views of the progress of humanity which were based on a risible natural philosophy which expected to raise man ‘to a rank in which he would be, as it were,
all
M
IND
; would enjoy unclouded perspicacity and perpetual vitality; feed on
oxygene
, and never die, but
by his own consent
’. The
Anti-Jacobin
hardly needed to exaggerate.

The enlightened aspiration of a science of man, grounded in natural law, necessity and determinism, thus opened up novel prospects. There was the affecting picture of man the victim of social circumstances, exploited by political radicals and milked in sentimental novels. There was the image of the addictive personality, consumed by drink and drugs. There was also the Promethean medical vision of new drugs to cure old diseases – although these might turn, by a tragic twist, into diseases themselves. Whichever way, the ancient Christian humanist doctrine of free will was under threat, being exposed as mere rhetoric, wilfully ignoring all the circumstances of human life. The new determinism, by contrast, seemed to lack a logic of autonomous action, and Johnson remained to be answered: ‘All theory is against the freedom of the will; all experience for it.’