Beddoes’s correspondence network played a fundamental role in shaping a ‘culture of enquiry’ in which investigations in medicine, chemistry, literature, social reform were pursued together. Involved in this culture were figures of persistent interest to historians of chemistry and of medicine, to cultural historians and to literary scholars.
Beddoes was the friend or disciple of Joseph Priestley, Josiah Wedgwood, Erasmus Darwin and James Watt (the Lunar Society natural philosophers, writers and industrialists). The founder of the Bristol Pneumatic Institution where S. T. Coleridge, Humphry Davy and Robert Southey took nitrous oxide, he is now seen as a vital catalyst whose intellectual interests, reformist projects, and personal example helped precipitate the transformation of the late Enlightenment, through the French Revolution and its aftermath, into (what we recognize as) early Romanticism. In Roy Porter’s words, he was ‘a central late-Enlightenment figure’, a man of great influence on the development of science, medicine and literature because of his transmission of ideas in lectures, in print and through correspondence (Porter, p. 5).
An enabler who was generous with his ideas and a mentor who was collaborative in his projects, Beddoes drew together, in 1790s Bristol, a group of men and women—poets, doctors, experimentalists, radicals—that functioned, informally, as the Lunar Society’s youthful cousin and put the aging Lunar men’s ideas into action. Watt, for instance, found in Beddoes what he had been seeking in Darwin—a medic prepared to give the breathing apparatus that he designed to aid the treatment of consumption an institutional base and a lengthy trial. Beddoes’s father-in-law Richard Lovell Edgeworth saw Beddoes develop the educational techniques that he and Thomas Day had pioneered before the latter’s untimely death. Connecting the established and the new, Beddoes enthused his Bristol friends with the Lunar men’s writings and then had them meet their heroes in person. As a result of this process, Coleridge, Southey, Davy and William Wordsworth underwent a process of intellectual formation that that both bonded them to Beddoes and each other and gave direction to their writing. Other figures were drawn towards the Bristol circle: Ann Yearsley, the labouring-class poet who had fallen out with her patron Hannah More; John King/Johan Koenig, the expatriate Swiss surgeon; Thomas Wedgwood, experimentalist son of Josiah the pottery magnate; Gregory Watt, geologist and traveller (son of James the engineer); John and James Tobin, abolitionist heirs of Caribbean merchants; Thomas Poole, tanner, naturalist and social campaigner; and Joseph Cottle, the bookseller who would publish works by Beddoes, Southey and Davy as well as the seminal volume Lyrical Ballads.
If Bristol was the place where Beddoes drew together a vibrant culture of enquiry, he had already been building connections earlier in his career. Beddoes came to Bristol in 1793 as a respected medic and man of science whose career had been disrupted by suspicion of his radical, pro-French-revolution views. After undergraduate studies at Oxford, he had attended anatomy classes in London at the Great Windmill Street school established by William Hunter. From 1784 to 1786 he had studied at Edinburgh, attending lectures on medicine by William Cullen and on chemistry by Joseph Black. In 1787 he was in France, meeting Guyton de Morveau, who was experimenting on the purification of air, and Antoine Lavoisier, author of the revolutionary new system of chemical classification in which what Joseph Priestley had called ‘dephlogisticated air’ was re-conceptualised as oxygen. In 1788 he became a Reader at Oxford, lecturing on chemistry and geology, and publishing papers in the Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society. This promising career came to an end in 1792 when, appalled by the imprisonment of the French monarch, the British establishment closed ranks against radicals. Beddoes realised he would not gain a professorship at Oxford, and Sir Joseph Banks shut the Royal Society to him.
After relocating to Bristol, Beddoes became a campaigner for reform of established authority in both politics and medicine. He gave lectures and published pamphlets against the government; he appealed for funds to establish a Pneumatic Institution where he might experiment with new medical treatments. This dual radicalism was the antithesis of an Oxford career. The major benefactors of the Institution were either Whigs with sympathies for reform (such as the Duchess of Devonshire), or Midlands industrialists who were not university-educated gentlemen (such as Wedgwood and Watt). By this time, Beddoes had strengthened his ties to the Lunar Society group by marrying (in April 1794) Edgeworth’s daughter Anna, and by becoming a regular correspondent of Darwin, who was recommending consumptive patients to purchase breathing apparatus designed by Watt. With the support of Watt and the other patrons, notably the Wedgwoods, Beddoes was able to open the Institution in 1799—one of Britain’s first medical research laboratories. There, Humphry Davy and his successors conducted chemical experiments designed to discover new treatments; these treatments were then offered free to the poor.
What made Beddoes an admirable figure to a younger generation radicalized by the French Revolution was not just his reformist practice, but also his demystifying representation of it in print. As Roy Porter has argued, ‘in an age…pervaded by print culture, by newspapers, opinion, and ideology…Beddoes was path-breaking as a writer’ (Porter, p. 8). Beddoes published heavily, in many formats—translations of German medical theory, cheap pamphlets aimed at the labouring classes, poems, case histories, accounts of experiments, medical polemics, and political tracts targeting more educated readers. In each area his democratizing tendency was manifested at the level of literary style as well as argumentative content. A Letter to Erasmus Darwin, M.D. on a New Method of Treating Pulmonary Consumption (1793) and Observations on the Nature and Cure of Calculus, Sea Scurvy, Consumption, Catarrh, and Fever (1793) are collections of materials deriving from correspondents: case histories, reports, and self-experiments that gather evidence about the efficacy of oxygen inhalation and other treatments. They illustrate Beddoes’s determination to benefit medicine by bringing into the public sphere information that would otherwise remain merely local—even if the results were not conclusive. He felt no need to present a fully worked-out, self-consistent argument, identifiably his own: these publications acted as a clearing-house of latest practices across Europe. His poem Alexander’s Expedition down the Hydaspes & the Indus to the Indian Ocean (1792) also incorporated others’ voices. Including voluminous notes (a formal innovation developed by Erasmus Darwin in The Botanic Garden) it comprised a verse/prose commentary on the evils of tyrannical government, military conquest and colonial domination. A Word in Defence of the Bill of Rights, Against Gagging Bills (1795) spoke in forthright, post-Tom Paine prose against the government’s repression of free speech and right to assembly. The History of Isaac Jenkins, and Sarah His Wife, and Their Three Children (1796) adopted colloquial language and a sentimental story to address the poor, whose reading skills were low, about the benefits of a healthy lifestyle. It proved highly popular, and pioneered the genre of socially and morally improving tales that, after the Cheap Respository Tracts of Beddoes’s acquaintance Hannah More, became a feature of nineteenth-century print culture. Hygëia: Or Essays Moral and Medical on the Cause Affecting the Personal State of Our Middling and Affluent Classes (1802–3) was a foundational text of social medicine: it related the diseases suffered by the affluent middle-classes to the new consumerist lifestyles they had adopted in the rapidly urbanizing and commercializing nation.
Beddoes’s letters illuminate his publications: they show him gathering information, sketching out ideas, and seeing his writing into print. They show him forging networks of intellectuals that spanned Britain and Europe. Among Beddoes’s correspondents were major men of science Joseph Banks, Joseph Black, Erasmus Darwin, Humphry Davy, Richard Lovell Edgeworth, Davies Giddy, Joseph Priestley, and James Watt. The industrialists James Keir and Josiah Wedgwood received many letters; writers Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Maria Edgeworth, Jean Paul Richter and Robert Southey were also correspondents. Topics addressed in the letters include: treatment regimes, case histories, drug trials, the doctor/patient relationship, administration of digitalis, oxygen and nitrous oxide, the medical theories of Cullen and Brown; iron manufacture, steam technology, chemical theory (phlogiston and caloric); revolutionary politics, education schemes for women and for children; contemporary poetry (Beddoes advised on Darwin’s Botanic Garden at proof stage), scientific journals, translation of medical theories, the Pneumatic Institution, electrochemistry.
The correspondence is revealing of the interrelated nature of intellectual debate in the Enlightenment republic of letters. A letter to Davies Giddy, for example, might contain comments on The Botanic Garden, discussions of the progress of the French Revolution, and plans for the treatment of consumption by oxygen. Yet the letters also show that this Enlightenment blend came under severe pressure after political reaction to the French Revolution led to the distrust of intellectuals and the arrest of radicals. In 1791, the Home Office wrote to one of Beddoes’s acquaintances seeking evidence of his subversive activities; Beddoes suspected that its agents were opening his letters and might use them against him at trial. He learned to couch his political discussions carefully, but nevertheless continued spreading radical opinions and campaigning for reform. In medicine too, he maintained a commitment to innovation, aiming to revolutionize the treatment of major diseases with new forms of clinical practice based on the latest scientific discoveries and technological advances: in letters to Darwin, Wedgwood and Watt he developed new forms of treatment with drugs (digitalis and nitrous acid) and with gases (oxygen and nitrous oxide). Beddoes also became a pioneer of preventative medicine based on accurate information: letters show him attempting to collect standardized data on the relationship of health to lifestyle and to environment (including industrial and commercial workplaces). The aim was to become able to make sociological analyses that correlated disease with class and with location. Charting the varied effects of urbanization and commercialization on the labouring and middle classes, he would gain evidence for social and moral reform.
Beddoes’s letters were vital components of intellectual networks: by his voluminous correspondence he linked medicine and philosophy in Britain and Germany, and chemistry in Britain and France. He was a reader, translator and reviewer of foreign publications with one of the few libraries of contemporary German treatises and periodicals in Britain. His correspondence shows how he ordered books and journals from Germany, how he reviewed foreign publications, and how he disseminated British ideas to the continent. As Vickers (p. 55) and Shaffer (pp. 28, 313) have argued, his connections with medical students at Göttingen—forged in person but continued by letter—allowed Beddoes to play a key role in mediating the introduction of Brunonian medicine to Germany and Kantian philosophy to Britain. Coleridge’s decision to study at Göttingen in 1798–9—a decision that would re-set his intellectual course towards post-Kantian philosophy, natural history and Biblical criticism—had Beddoes as its impetus.
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