Two Cultures

In the late 1950s C. P. Snow stirred up a controversy when he spoke of "two cultures" in Britain: the culture of science and the culture of the humanities. Snow said it was deplorable that most humanists knew little about the major scientific developments of the modern age. Though Snow made excessive claims for the importance of scientific knowledge, he was right to say that in the past things had been different. At the beginning of the nineteenth century there was one culture. Many scientists, who were called natural philosophers (the word scientist was not coined until 1834), consorted with poets, and some scientists wrote poetry. Erasmus Darwin, a distinguished botanist, was the author of the long poem Loves of the Plants (1789). Darwin would become the friend and patron of Thomas Beddoes, who is the main figure in Mike Jay's illuminating The Atmosphere of Heaven.

Born in 1760, Beddoes was a polymath whose interests included literature, medicine, geology, and botany. Fluent in Greek and Latin as well as French, German, Spanish, and Italian, Beddoes published a novel and a long poem in heroic couplets. The novel, which was popular, was praised by Coleridge; the privately printed poem was third rate, and Beddoes later was happy it had not circulated widely. Beddoes's chief interests were chemistry and medicine. At Edinburgh University he studied chemistry under Joseph Black, the man who discovered "fixed air" (carbon dioxide). In 1786 he received a medical degree from Oxford.

While on a geological trek in Cornwall, Beddoes noticed that many men suffered from miner's lung and that in general there was widespread consumption—or what we would now call tuberculosis. Beddoes would spend the next fifteen years of his short life—he died in 1808—trying to treat diseases of the lungs. In 1793 he decided to leave Oxford, where he was teaching chemistry, and move to Bristol to set up a medical clinic and research institute. In March 1799 the Pneumatic Institution opened, advertising that it treated gratis diseases "hitherto found incurable, upon a new plan." The new plan was inhaling "factitious airs"—that is, various compounds of oxygen. Beddoes explained his therapeutic method in a pamphlet, Considerations on the Medicinal Use of Factitious Airs, and on the Manner of Obtaining Them in Large Quantities.

Beddoes had another interest: politics. He was a strong supporter of the French Revolution, though he became disgusted by the course the revolution took under Robespierre. In the mid-1790s Beddoes became involved in British politics—publishing several pamphlets, including one that attacked William Pitt, the Tory prime minister. Joseph Black wrote that he was "sorry to see that Beddoes is so absurd and wrong-headed as to set himself up as a statesman and attack Mr. Pitt." Beddoes himself said, "I know very well that my politics have been very injurious to the airs." When a shipment of frogs destined for the institution's laboratory escaped on Bristol's quayside, it was rumored that they were food for the French revolutionaries hidden in the institution's cellars.

Despite his radical politics, Beddoes persuaded several important people to support his clinic. His chief patron was Tom Wedgwood, the brilliant but sickly son of Josiah Wedgwood. Other patrons included Georgiana, duchess of Devonshire, and Erasmus Darwin. In March 1794 Beddoes wrote James Watt to ask him, as Jay says, "to design a customized pneumatic apparatus that could synthesize a range of gases and dispense them comfortably to patients." Watt, who was semiretired, complied with Beddoes's request. Beddoes also acquired a brilliant assistant, Humphry Davy, who would become Britain's leading scientist.

After several years of operation it was clear that Beddoes's "new plan" did not work. Davy offered a sober assessment of the institution's experiments: "Pneumatic chemistry in its application to medicine is an art yet in its infancy, weak, almost useless." The institution eventually became a clinic for the poor. It was renamed Medical Institution for the...