Overview
A Birmingham physician, William Withering (1741-99) was a member of the Lunar Society and a friend of Joseph Priestley. In 1776 he published the Linnean work The Botanical Arrangement of All the Vegetables Naturally Growing in Great Britain and in 1785 his Account of the Foxglove, the work in which he demonstrated the therapeutic efficacy of digitalis — the drug Beddoes would use on many patients at the Pneumatic Institution. In this letter, Beddoes, then a Fellow and lecturer on chemistry at Oxford, cultivates a relationship with Withering by helping him avoid embarrassment in a dispute with Erasmus Darwin that had led to the circulation of accusations among medical and scientific men. The letter is of interest, too, because, while illustrating the variety of Beddoes’s scientific information, it also illuminates the reception of Lavoisier’s new chemical system in Britain and shows the continuing power of Joseph Priestley’s phlogistion chemistry. In addition, it reveals Beddoes’s assiduousness in positioning himself as a younger follower of the Midlands Enlightenment philosophers. Over the next five years, he would become a valued colleague and/or friend of many in the Lunar Society — including James Keir, James Watt and Erasmus Darwin.

 
 

Thomas Beddoes to William Withering, 10 March 1789

Dear Sir,

I have not been inattentive amid a sufficient hurry of business to your commissions. I do not find that any medical person here has received any of the printed letters: & therefore I have followed your directions in keeping your statement by me.1 I hear but perhaps am misinformed that there has been another publication by D. on the subject.2

I did not expect any success in my enquiries among the Oxford booksellers for Dillenius:3 & I am sorry to add that I have not been disappointed. It must be a rare accident that shd bring or detain any scarce & valuable work among them, their collections being confined to lecture-books & Greek Latin, & English Classicks.

Dr. Priestly has sent me his third paper & I am now constrained to relinquish the beautiful system of Lavoisier, at least the antiphlogistic part of it.4 He shewed me a curious phenomenon respecting the iron tube he uses for mift5 air & I sent him what I imagine to be the true explanation of it.6 I know not whether he has thought it worth imparting to the Society of Birmingham Philosophers.7

The spirit of Chemistry has almost evaporated at Oxford, as indeed I always expected it wd. The young men are generally speaking regardless of every thing; & as there are few amusements here, they spend their time in the most stupid kind of dissipation imaginable; often sitting together & gaping at one another the whole day through. They find that when they have taken the degree of M.A. that they know little or nothing & then the better sort think it high time to bestir themselves. Accordingly my class was chiefly composed of the senior members of the University & still those who attend now for the third time make a considerable part of it. But their curiosity, as far as can be done in an elementary course, must be satisfied; & perhaps in half a dozen years more there will arise another race of men desirous to know something of this branch of Nat. Philosophy. At present, the stock of curiosity seems nearly exhausted.

Walker has frozen mercury*8 several times this winter; twice in my presence during the last snow.9 It is certainly not a perfect metal, having scarce more malleability than some of the semi-metals. It was each time frozen very hard, & a very small qty (3 drs perhaps) took 7 minutes in thawing. Yet no sooner had I flattened it a little than the edges began to crack & the whole mass soon broke into several pieces. I have not yet found time to draw up my paper.10 Dr Thomson11 thinks the specimens I shewed him exceedingly curious, & he agrees with me that they will tend very much to establish the igneous theory of the earth.12

I am, Dr Sir, yours respectfully

Thomas Beddoes

10th March 1789

 

MS: Typed transcription inserted in a copy of Stock, Osler Library of the History of Medicine, McGill University Library, B399zs 1811
Address: Dr Withering / Birmingham
Endorsement: Beddoes Dr. 1789. / Chemistry. Approves Priestleys theory, / Science not encouraged in Oxford.

 

Notes

1. Withering was in dispute with Dr Robert Waring Darwin (1766-1848) (son of Erasmus Darwin, with whom Withering had argued over priority in the discovery of the clinical uses of digitalis), over the treatment (in 1788) of a patient – a Mrs Houlston – who had died. Both men had been consulted; Darwin blamed Withering for countermanding his prescribed treatment and causing Houlston’s death. A bitter exchange of letters ensued, and in December 1788 some of them, casting Withering in a bad light, were printed and circulated to medical men. Withering believed that Erasmus Darwin was responsible for this, and defended himself in print in a statement dated 31 December 1788.

2. There was a further publication, as Beddoes thought. In An Appeal to the Faculty Concerning the Case of Mrs Houlston, Robert Waring Darwin printed all the previously published correspondence together with a letter he had written to Withering on 6 February 1789 and an ‘Appeal’ to the reader justifying his conduct. This pamphlet too was circulated among medical men. Later in the year, the dispute was submitted to arbitration by a third party and both Darwin and Withering signed an agreement to end it.

3. Johann Jacob Dillenius (1684-1747), the botanist who had held the Sherardian chair of botany at Oxford University and published a work on mosses and lichens, Historia muscorum (1741). Withering was making a study of mosses, having published on them in the second edition of his botanical work A Botanical Arrangement of British Plants – Including the Uses of Each Species in Medicine, Diet, Rural Economy and the Arts (1787).

4. In papers ‘Experiments and Observations Relating to the Principle of Acidity, the Composition of Water, and Phlogiston’, PTRS, 78 (1788), 147-57 and ‘Additional Experiments and Observations Relating to the Principle of Acidity, the Composition of Water and Phlogiston’, PTRS, 78 (1788), 313-30, Joseph Priestley had argued against Antoine Lavoisier’s antiphlogistic critique of his work on chemical reactions. Priestley contended that, rather than ‘oxygen’ being the acid-forming principle, all acids are combinations of phlogiston with water. These arguments were criticized by Lavoisier’s collaborator Claude-Louis Berthollet in ‘Considérations sur les expériences de M. Priestley’, Annales de chimie, 3 (1789), 63-114. Priestley continued the debate in his ‘Objections to the Experiments and Observations Relating to the Principle of Acidity, the Composition of Water and Phlogiston’, PTRS, 79 (1789), 7-20. Beddoes repeated this endorsement of Priestley’s work in his letter to Joseph Black of 21 April 1789, only to add an objection to Priestley’s interpretation of one of his experiments.

5. Mephitic air. In modern terms, most likely a compound containing much nitrogen.

6. This communication has not been traced. Many of Priestley’s papers were burnt in the arson attack on his Birmingham house and laboratory in July 1791. Beddoes was researching the effects of heat on iron in the furnaces of his Shropshire friend and neighbour William Reynolds. ‘An Account of Some Appearances Attending the Conversion of Cast into Malleable Iron. In a Letter from Thomas Beddoes, M.D. to Sir Joseph Banks, Bart. P.R.S.’ was published in PTRS, 81 (1791), 173-81.

7. That is, the Lunar Society, of which Withering was a member.

8. Instead of the word mercury, Beddoes uses the alchemical symbol for mercury alchemical symbol for mercury

9. Beddoes had described Richard Walker’s Oxford researches on cold in his ‘An Account of Some New Experiments on the Production of Artificial Cold. In a Letter to the Right Hon. Sir Joseph Banks, P.R.S.’, PTRS, 77 (1787), 267-81. Walker himself provided an account of his further work, in his paper of 27 March 1788, read to the Royal Society on 5 June 1788, ‘Experiments on the Production of Artificial Cold. By Mr. Richard Walker, Apothecary to the Radcliffe Infirmary at Oxford. In a letter to Henry Cavendish, Esq. F. R. S. and A. S’, PTRS, 78 (1788), 395-402 (p. 401).

10. Perhaps the paper on igneous rocks later published as ‘Observations on the Affinity Between Basaltes and Granite’, PTRS, 81 (1791), 48-70. Withering was himself a mineralogist and had in 1784 predicted the presence of an element – barium – in the heavy ore terra ponderosa. In 1789 a form of barium carbonate was named Witherite in his honour.

11. William Thomson (1761-1806), Beddoes’s fellow lecturer at Oxford, who like Beddoes had studied medicine at the University of Edinburgh, and had interests in mineralogy and natural history.

12. Beddoes gives more detail about these specimens in his letter to Joseph Black of 21 April 1789.