The Enlightenment of Thomas Beddoes: Science, Medicine, and Reform by Trevor Levere et al. (review)

The meteoric career of the English physician and chemist Thomas Beddoes (1760–1808) reached its climax in the 1790s. Denied a chair in chemistry at Oxford because of his outspoken political radicalism, he moved to Bristol, whence he issued a steady stream of publications calling for reform in politics and the medical profession. By tapping connections with the industrial and intellectual elite of his native West Midlands, he raised funds for the Medical Pneumatic Institution, which opened in Bristol in 1797. The institution dispensed oxygen and other gases as treatments for a range of diseases, especially consumption. Under the supervision of the young Humphry Davy, it achieved fame—and notoriety—by inviting patients and guests to partake of the euphoria-inducing nitrous oxide ("laughing gas") and publicizing the results.

While Davy went on to a glorious career of scientific discovery, Beddoes's own fame had faded somewhat by the time of his death at the age of fortyeight. Many scholars have nonetheless been intrigued by his involvement in both radical politics and experimental therapies. Biographies have been published by Dorothy Stansfield (1984), Roy Porter (1992), and Mike Jay (2009), and articles have continued to appear by Trevor Levere, David P. Miller, Larry Stewart, and Frank James. The volume under review is not another biography, but a collection of chapters on aspects of Beddoes's career, and it complements pieces the authors have published elsewhere. Levere and Stewart contribute a short introduction, in which they place Beddoes in the context of the political upheavals of his day. They argue that his commitment to reform made him sympathetic to the ideals of the French Revolution, resistant to British government repression, and ambitious to bring medical treatment to the poor.

In the first substantial chapter, Levere surveys Beddoes's training in chemistry, tracing his progress in the science from his days as an undergraduate at Oxford and Edinburgh. He corresponded extensively with his former Edinburgh professor Joseph Black, and with the Midlands luminaries Erasmus Darwin and James Watt, who shared his fascination with the potential of pneumatic medicine and designed apparatus to dispense the gases. Alongside chemistry and medicine, Beddoes was also pursuing interests in mineralogy and geology, as Hugh Torrens explains in his chapter. He championed the ideas of the Scottish geologist James Hutton on the role of heat in forging rock formations. Beddoes's partisanship toward Hutton's igneous theory, along with his political radicalism, earned him the nickname "Fire-spouter" from some of his critics. He also presciently declared in 1792 that the history of the earth extended over millions of years, giving voice to an expansive vista that some geologists had glimpsed but were still reluctant to articulate. A lengthy chapter by Stewart fills out the picture of the political dimension of Beddoes's work. Pneumatic medicine had its roots in Joseph Priestley's studies of the healthiness of air in different locations and in emerging concerns about the pollution affecting manufacturing centres. Beddoes and his democratic allies saw reformed medicine as a way to defuse popular unrest, whereas their establishment critics believed it was itself a dangerous and subversive innovation. They thus found themselves, as Stewart says, "trapped between riot and repression" (123).

The remaining chapters deal with more marginal aspects of Beddoes's activities. Levere describes his work as a translator, reviewer, and bookcollector. Beddoes worked strenuously to bring German works—including those of Immanuel Kant—to the attention of English readers. His interest in epistemology also informed his pedagogical projects, such as promoting the use of models for teaching mathematical concepts, explained in the chapter by Torrens and Joseph Wachelder. Finally, Torrens also contributes an appendix on Beddoes's first biographer, Dr. John Edmonds Stock. As a student in Edinburgh in 1794, Stock was accused of seditious activities and escaped punishment by going underground and then fleeing to the...