Thomas Beddoes to Samuel Taylor Coleridge, August/September 1803 (copy)
As far as I can conjecture your gout is willing to become gout if it could – the Gout medicine may help it on to this. I suppose you should try it in two ways. first by drinking 4 5 or 6 glasses at the interval of 1 2 or 3 hours each day. I suppose if in 4 5 or 6 days your stomach do not feel a different creature, it will be hardly worth while holding on.
But shd you not be careful that there be no vinegar brewed all this time? suppose the medicine by changing the stomach, changes all the sensations, a stomach-full of wind & sourness will change them all back again. I do not know if I can propose any means of prevention you have not already practised. But food not acescent in general, with super carbonated sm. ale (or calcined magnesia in case of costiveness) with ginger to check any commencement of acid fermentation seem to me to promise.
The second method must be confined to the time of appearance of gouty inflammation about the feet. Then I would urge the medicine, taking a glass (2oz) every 4 5 or 6 minutes till I glowed red hot. I have more expectation from this cutting & spurring than the other gentle lashing. Most medical men would recommend the Bath waters, supposing them to connect the letters g o u t with the other sufferings .
I should have been glad of your remarks on my Essays, tho I sincerely think they contain few texts worth your commenting upon. I did not think I ever could have written them in any other manner – I mean except by compulsion. I imagined that by writing even in that manner I could save many human beings much of the direct pain which human beings can suffer. And thus were they begun & ended in a spirit of true humiliation.
I possibly may be able to send you in a few weeks 48 pages worth all the good & tolerable of all Hygeia. – If a fit of gout in the feet bring the movements of the medullary fibres of the brain excited by the said Hygeia, & corresponding ones of the fingers into the juxta-position of time, I shall feel some gratification. for I am anxious <curious> to know whether I have anticipated your opinion of its demerits. So far you may proceed on recollection. particular doctrines may require reference.
So wishing (if you wish it) that you may writhe & write I am &c –
How is the Liver? I think nothing of the paralytic feelings. they may be paralytic, but the palsy of hysteria & hypochondriasis goes off always: & there may be very different states of nerve producing impotence of will over muscles.
[In the same letter to Coleridge, Southey also transcribes a letter to Coleridge from Beddoes’s associate Anthony Welles about his gout cure: ]
from Dr Anti-podagra.
Sir
It is seldom that I feel more satisfaction in any action than I do in the one I am now engaged in. A letter from Dr Beddoes yesterday informed me you were gouty – he need not have added that you wished to be cured – for I shd have supposed it. I have in my possession a kind of nectar (for it removes pain, & of course promotes pleasure, & may in the end immortalize – me) – [MS torn] I freely offer to you. I will farther add the prediction founded on experience, that you may be relieved from the gout & your general health improved into the bargain. for confirmation of this you may consult Sir Wilfred Lawson Bart &c who is your near you, & Thomas Wyndham Esqr M P – Dunraven Castle near Cardiff Glamorgans. whom I beg you will enquire of for your own consolation. & if you should then wish to try this remedy & will give me a particular detail of your gouty affections & general habits of life, I will immediately send you the medicine with such directions as I believe will not fail to bring about the desired effect.
&c.
A Welles.
18 London Vale London.
<After Michaelmas my address will be 44 Upper Titchfield Street.>.
MS: University of Kentucky Library. ALS; 4p. (c).
Published: Collected Letters of Robert Southey, gen eds. Lynda Pratt, Tim Fulford and Ian Packer. Romantic Circles Electronic Editions, 838.