Thomas Beddoes to Mr Ashwell [1794–1802] (fragment)
Professor Buckland, in a speech delivered at the late Bristol meeting, told a curious anecdote of the late Dr Beddoes, which the friends of the tee-total system think might as well have been spared. Dr Beddoes, he said, had made the diseases of females his particular study, and observed that nervous affections were a fruitful source of illness. This nervousness, he was convinced, had its origin in certain electrical changes, and that these changes were accelerated by a practice which in his day, and he feared it had not diminished, was very prevalent, that of drinking strong green tea [laughter]. To demonstrate this to his patients, and considering that to preserve human life was an object that would excuse cruelty to frogs, he determined upon keeping a number of frogs in a pond of green tea, and exhibiting to his patients the nervous symptoms that would shortly be induced. To his friend, Mr. Ashwell, of Colebrook Dale, he wrote, requesting him to procure ten thousand frogs, which was done: they were packed in a sugar hogshead, and with other packages were forwarded to Bristol. Some other packages containing ironmongery, required to be raised by a crane, and as there was no difference in the appearance of the packages, when the hogshead containing the frogs was hoisted, it flew up to the top of the crane, broke, and out in a moment, upon the Quay at Bristol, leaped 10,000 frogs! This was the agitated period of the French revolution, and the Doctor had entered upon the stormy discussions of the day with all the zeal of an interested partisan. No sooner, then, had the frogs leaped out, when the mob, little dreaming of the connection between frogs and green tea, electricity and nervousness, jumped to the conclusion that, because the Doctor wanted frogs, he must have Frenchmen in his house, and that these Frenchmen were bloody-minded revolutionary Jacobins, who had come over to kill the King and upset the Government. They determined to prevent that mischief by setting fire to Dr Beddoes’s house, a determination which it required all the eloquence of another physician to prevent.
Published: Sherborne Mercury, 12 September 1836, p. 2. The report also appeared in the Bath Chronicle, 15 September 1836, the Preston Chronicle, 17 September 1836, the Sheffield Independent, 24 September 1836.