Overview
This letter is significant because it reveals the response of British middle-class radicals to watershed events in the French Revolution on which they had placed so much hope. Beddoes, James Keir and Richard Lovell Edgeworth, it shows, recoiled from the violence of the Jacobin coup of August 1792 and from the san culottes’ storming of the Tuileries. Yet they attempted to retain hope for a democratic and peaceful future, while many British reformers abandoned support for the revolution at that point. The letter turns from politics to discuss the exciting news from Italy about electricity. Beddoes repeats the experiments of Luigi Galvani (1737-1798) and those of Alessandro Volta (1745-1827) that challenged Galvani’s concept of ‘animal electricity’. Typically, he hailed the new work as a breakthrough that would not only allow electrical treatments of bodily ailments but, more significantly, put medicine on a new, scientific footing, doing away with the ‘crude hypotheses & inefficacious recipes’ of ‘physicians and apothecaries’. His later career would consist, again and again, of his seeking to effect, through scientific experiment, a radical simplification of medicine that would both conquer disease and revolutionise the medical profession.

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Thomas Beddoes to Davies Giddy, 12 September [1792]¹

West Bromwich near Birmingham Sep^r 12

Now the Nat^l Ass^y by their incapacity & cowardice have united every thing that is ridiculous with every thing that is horrible, one has not the smallest inclination left to take the trouble of thinking about France.³ Keir, Edgworth, who is not only a good mechanic,⁵ but in every respect a superior man & your humble servant, have been uselessly occupied during a good part of the three last days in designing sketches of the future free of that unfortunate country.

We are all agreed that the Jacobin members of the Assembly by associating the valets de place,⁶ porteurs d’eau⁷ & c with whom Paris abounds, with the banditti from Marseilles in order to overpower the friends of the court, who were unfortunately compounded with the friends of the constitution, have wielded a weapon, which has recoiled with fatal violence upon themselves & their country.⁸ The situation was doubtless difficult, for the treachery of the executive power seems to be proved by a incontrovertible evidence; which evidence is corroborated by every consideration applicable to the subject: Had the assembly instead of passing & revoking & modifying decrees at the command of a populace, whose appetite for blood seems to have grown by feeding upon it, firmly opposed themselves to their sanguinary fury, <after the 10^th Aug> they might have been checked.⁹ The exp^t was dangerous, but it ought to have been made by men, who have so often sworn, la constitution ou la mort.¹⁰ It was only in the Senate house where the risqué of their lives could have tended to save their country. I see no chance left, unless their host of assassins sh^d each man fall & bring down an enemy at the same time. They are certainly not less dangerous enemies to France than its invaders.¹¹

It is fortunate that the wonderful discoveries just made in Italy produce a diversion of thought, at a moment when one is so much inclined to be dissatisfied with every thing & every person, not excepting one’s own dear self. These discoveries though so extraordinary are so well attested that upon the faith of my knowledge of some of the persons to whom they have been exhibited < in France> I can pledge myself for the truth of the acc^t.¹² If you separate the lower ext^s of a frog, flay the thighs & take care not to injure the crural nerves, which you are to dissect < dowze> for a little way; then coat the ends of the crural nerves with lead or tin foil & form a communication with this coating & the muscles by means of a piece of silver or some conductor diff^t from the coating, the half frog will jump with considerable force. — Place two glasses of water near each other; into one (A) put the flayed half frog; in the other glass (B) let the coated nerve hang. plunge your finger into the water of B. make a ring of 1.2.3 or twenty persons & let the last hold a piece of silver in the free hand & touch the coa muscles, & the frog will jump out of the glass.

Mr Volta has found that if you put a bit of lead under your tongue & a bit of silver above, & then form a communication you will have immediately a strong taste, of which you was before the commⁿ utterly insensible: or put a bit of lead & silver upon your tongue separately & you will have no taste; put them together or one upon another & you will have the same taste, which being of a very decided nature I leave you to find out — While we were repeating these expts here, I proposed to taste the electrical aura; we did so; Miss Keir¹³ & the ladies abstract their attention from the smell. According to the testimony of my tongue, the taste is of the same kind <not the same degree> as the taste of the combined [xxxx] metals. One of the philosophers agreed with me. the rest of the gentlemen of the party were doubtful — among others Mr Keir.

I had before satisfied myself fully as to the cause of muscular motion. These discoveries add a new probability to the theory I had formed several months ago.¹⁴ In a 12month the face of medicine will be changed,¹⁵ & every body will study it as the most curious & interesting of all the sciences; before it was a chaos of contradictions, & none but those who were well paid would submit to the disagreeable task of trying to reconcile these contradictions or even to learn a multitude of unconnected facts <crude hypotheses & inefficacious recipes> – There will soon be an end of physicians & apothecaries; or at least a gradual diminution of a body of men, who do & have done infinitely more mischief than good, will begin to take place.

T. Beddoes

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Notes

1. Year from endorsement.

2. Beddoes was visiting the chemist and industrialist James Keir at his home in Tipton, near Dudley and West Bromwich.

3. The Legislative Assembly in Paris had neither prevented nor condemned the massacres that had occurred in the city between 2 and 7 September. Over a thousand prisoners were killed by the mob of armed citizens.

4. Richard Lovell Edgeworth (1744-1817), friend of Keir and of Erasmus Darwin. Edgeworth was Beddoes’s future father-in-law.

5. Edgeworth had designed a machine to measure an area of land; he had also invented a tracked cart.

6. A guide for travellers.

7. Water carriers.

8. In August, with foreign armies progressing towards Paris, the Jacobins stoked rumours that their opponents in the Legislative Assembly—the Girondins (who advocated constitutional monarchy)—were betraying the revolution. A Jacobin-led coup took control of the government, via a Commune headed by Georges Danton (1759-1794), Camille Desmoulins (1760-1794) and Jacques Hébert (1757-1794). The Commune ruled by manipulating the Parisian sans culottes, organized into a popular paramilitary force, and aided by armed volunteers who had been invited to the city in July to defend the revolution (hence Beddoes’s remark about bandits (the ‘fé dé ré s’) from Marseilles). Maximilien Robespierre, the speaker of the Commune, proposed the formation of a revolutionary tribunal: this had the power to sentence prisoners to death without the right of appeal.

9. On 10 August, the san culottes and fé dé ré s stormed the Tuileries palace, and Louis XVI and his family were arrested. Louis sought asylum from the Legislative Assembly, but was imprisoned. He was deprived of all his royal functions and prerogatives. The Assembly then resolved to dissolve itself so that it might be superseded by a National Convention, to be elected by universal suffrage.

10.‘The constitution or death’: a revolutionary slogan.

11. The combined armies of Austria and Prussia, commanded by Charles William Ferdinand, Duke of Brunswick-Wolfenbüttel (1735-1806), had invaded France in July in order to protect the monarchy; it was fear that these armies, rapidly moving towards Paris, would restore Louis XVI to absolute rule that led to the sans culottes’ storming of his palace.

12. The discovery by Luigi Galvani (1737-1798) of, as he thought, ‘animal electricity’ when the legs of a frog twitched if connected to an electrical circuit. Galvani published an account of his work in De Viribus Electricitatis in Motu Musculari (1791). In 1792 a second edition of the Italian version of this work, Commentario . . . sulle forze dell’elettricita nel movimento mucsolare, led to Galvani’s interpetation of his experiment being challenged by Alessandro Volta (1745-1827), who showed that the source of the electricity was not animal, but the contact of two dissimilar, moist metals. Galvani’s experiment was replicated in Paris on 11 July by Eusebio Valli, before a Commission of the Académie des Sciences. Among those present were several savants whom Beddoes knew from his sojourn in Paris in 1787: Louis-Bernard Guyton-Morveau (1737-1816), Antoine François, comte de Fourcroy (1755-1809), Jean Noël Hallé (1754-1822), Charles-Augustin de Coulomb (1736-1806), and Louis Nicolas Vauquelin (1763-1829). The experiment was reported in a series of letters by Valli, published in the August and October issues of the Journal de physique, de chimie et d'histoire naturelle et des arts, 41 (1792), 66-77 (August), 185-202 (October). Typically, Beddoes had received reports of continental science very quickly.

13. Amelia Keir, Keir’s only child.

14. Beddoes’s theory proceeded from his reading of the work on irritability of Erasmus Darwin (whose account in The Botanic Garden (1791) he had read before publication) and the work on excitability of John Brown (1735-1788) (whose Elementa Medicinae he would translate as Elements of Medicine in 1795).

15. Beddoes was planning to use electrical therapies to stimulate the muscular and nervous systems. See his letter of 8 October to Giddy.