The Age of Wonder (44 page)

That winter Beddoes published Davy’s earliest speculative essays on the chemistry of heat and starlight, which followed Lavoisier’s ideas on ‘oxygen’ but also challenged his concept of what Davy called briskly ‘the imaginary fluid caloric’. They appeared in Beddoes’s annual anthology, published by Joseph Cottle,
Contributions to Physical and Medical Knowledge, principally in the West of England,
which was intended to give publicity to the Institute and encourage donations. Cottle had also, as it happened, just brought out that autumn an anonymous little book of poems entitled
Lyrical Ballads.

Davy’s two main essays were far the most ambitious contribution to the anthology, and announced his intellectual arrival in Bristol. He set out to champion chemistry, and speculate about its future, on the grandest metaphysical scale. In a Penzance notebook he had exclaimed: ‘What we mean by Nature is a series of
visible images:
but these are constituted by light. Hence the worshipper of Nature is a worshipper of light.’
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In his Essay 1, ‘On Heat, Light and the Combinations of Light’, he developed this into an entire cosmological vision, in which the whole universe was powered by starlight as well as Newtonian gravity, and would eventually be understood as a single unified idea. ‘We may consider the sun and the fixed stars (the suns of other worlds) as immense reservoirs of light, destined by the great Organizer to diffuse over the Universe organization and animation. And thus will the law of Gravitation, as well as the Chemical laws, be considered as one great end-PERCEPTION. Reasoning thus it will not appear improbable that one law alone may govern and act upon matter,-an Energy of Mutation impressed by the will of the Deity-a law which may be called the law of Animation.’

He added confidently that ‘the further we investigate the phenomenon of Nature, the more we discover simplicity and unity of design’.
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Even more radical was his suggestion that all human consciousness depended directly on physiological processes and ‘corpuscular’ changes. ‘Perception, ideas, pleasures and pains, are the effect of these changes…The laws of mind then, probably, are not different from the laws of corpuscular motion.’
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As a result the chemistry of the human body would provide a key to human well-being in the broadest sense. ‘We cannot entertain a doubt that every change in our sensations and ideas must be accompanied by some corresponding change in the organic matter of the body. These changes experimental investigation may enable us to determine. By discovering them we should be informed of the laws of our existence…Thus would chemistry, in its connection with the laws of Life, become the most sublime and important of all sciences.’
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Davy was making an almost metaphysical claim that chemistry might prove to be the path to ultimate knowledge. In an unpublished essay from this time, ‘An Essay to prove that Thinking Powers Depend on the Organization of the Body’, he went much further towards a materialist position. He played with the idea that all mental powers were produced by ‘the peculiar action of fluids upon solids’, that is, that there was a defining neurochemistry of the human brain. The ‘soul’ itself might ultimately be, or depend upon, a material entity. He argued that it was scientifically incorrect to believe that ‘God is unable to make matter think’. All mental problems-including pain and unhappiness-might be cured by the chemistry of drugs and gases.
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In Essay 2, ‘On the Generation of Phosoxygen’, Davy developed Lavoisier’s theory that all plants, when acted upon by sunlight, decomposed ‘carbonic acid gas’ (carbon dioxide) and released oxygen into the atmosphere. He also claimed to show experimentally that aquatic plants, when exposed to sunlight, oxygenated the surrounding water. Since all animal life did the reverse-absorbing oxygen in respiration and releasing carbonic gas-there was an essential equilibrium or harmony within nature. Davy had in effect described what is now known as the ‘carbon cycle’.
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Davy began his regular work at the Institute, seeing patients and administering gas and drugs according to Dr Beddoes’s instructions. These treatments were based on the ‘Brunonian system’, the theoretical work of Scottish physician John Brown (1735-88), hotly debated in the Edinburgh medical schools, which divided all medicines into stimulants and depressants. In fact this had very little basis in trials or experiment, as Davy gradually came to realise (and as Banks at the Royal Society had long suspected). Beddoes also introduced him to his Bristol publisher Joseph Cottle, and sent him to visit the Institute’s most influential supporters: the powerful Wedgwood family at Cote House, and James Watt and the Lunar Society in Birmingham. Davy made an excellent impression on everyone he met, and his circle of acquaintances rapidly expanded.

Initially Davy boarded with the Beddoes family in their large house at 3 Rodney Place, Clifton. Later he moved down the hill to live directly above the Institute and its laboratories and garden, in a corner of Dowry Square, Hotwells. As its name implied, the Hotwells district had a long tradition of thermal baths and healing spa establishments. But the small, reclusive Georgian square, tucked away into the hillside below Clifton village and wood, seemed an odd location for an experimental medical practice, with its daily stream of poverty-stricken patients, and its pungent aroma of chemicals and gases.

Hitherto the square had been an elegant
cul de sac,
with only its southern end opening onto the main Hotwells coaching road into Bristol city and docks. Until the arrival of Dr Beddoes’s Institute, it had evidently been a haven of tranquillity and respectability. The fine new brick and sandstone houses, with their tall sash windows and pillared porticoes, quietly enclosed a private garden on three sides. The Institute occupied two adjacent buildings, Nos 6 and 7, on an L-shaped site in what had previously been the north-west corner of the square, the quietest and furthest from the road. Beddoes chose the elegant No. 7 to house the main reception rooms and infirmary, while No. 6, more of a rabbit warren, contained the laboratories and staff quarters, and opened directly out onto a steep garden at the back. A separate outbuilding in that garden was used for the manufacture of gases and the storage of chemical compounds. No. 6 also had a wide tradesmen’s entrance, where medical supplies could be delivered in bulk by cart, and bodies (usually of small animals) could be removed.
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♣

As part of his policy of progressive public medicine, Beddoes advertised free pneumatic treatments for people suffering from consumption, asthma, palsy and scrofula. Untreatable or anti-social diseases, such as venereal infections, were also included. For more wealthy patients, the Institute offered inhaling kits that could be purchased and used in the home. This was one aspect of the Institute that Banks had objected to, as he felt it was open to quackery.
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For the first few months Davy, though delighted by his quarters, found himself acting largely as a medical superintendent. There were a number of assistants under his command, including two ancient bottle-washers, Dwyer and Clayfield, and young Dr Kinglake, whom he quickly dominated. But gradually the working rooms were fitted out, and for the first time in his life Davy was in charge of a well-equipped chemical laboratory.

By the spring of 1799 Beddoes agreed to Davy setting up a monitored series of gas-inhaling experiments, to see if any real scientific data could be gathered on the healing power of gases. In fact he intended to use the new empirical chemistry of Priestley and Lavoisier to test, and if necessary challenge, the Brunonian system of medicine by controlled experiment. He wrote to James Watt, an outstanding engineer, for designs of gasinhaling equipment, including a silken face-mask with a wooden mouthpiece. The masks and gas bags were based on balloon technology.
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In April 1799 Davy began his analysis of common air, and the workings of human respiration within the lung. He spread his initial experiments over various compounds of ‘factitious airs’, including hydrogen, carbon dioxide and carbon monoxide, and several combinations of nitrous gas. Before trying anything out on his patients, he tested everything on himself, often at grave risk. Fainting fits, nausea and stunning migraines frequently overcame him. But he was undaunted.

One early unguarded experiment with carbon monoxide (a lethal gas, still much favoured by garage suicides) almost killed him.
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At two in the afternoon he began to inhale four quarts of ‘pure hydrocarbonate’ in the presence of his assistant Patrick Dwyer and a new laboratory recruit, James Tobin. On inhaling the third quart he collapsed. ‘I seemed sinking into annihilation, and had just power enough to drop the mouthpiece from my unclosed lips…I faintly articulated, “I do not think I shall die.”’ Davy still had the presence of mind to take his own pulse-‘threadlike and beating with excessive quickness’-then staggered out of the laboratory into the garden of No. 6 Dowry Square.

Here he collapsed on the lawn, trembling and seized with agonising chest pains. He was semi-conscious for some minutes, and was given oxygen by the terrified Dwyer. After half an hour he thought he was recovered, but he became giddy again and was helped to a bed. He lay there for the rest of the day, suffering from ‘nausea, loss of memory, and deficient sensation’. He vomited, and was then overcome by ‘excruciating pain’ between the eyes. Finally by ten o’clock at night his symptoms began to ease, and he fell into an exhausted sleep.

Davy had nearly recovered his strength by the next evening, that is some thirty hours later. He concluded calmly that if he had taken ‘four or five [quart] inspirations instead of three’, he would have ‘destroyed life immediately without producing any painful sensations’. A week later he was trying to inhale ‘carbonic acid’ (perhaps vaporised phenol), which so burnt his epiglottis that he choked.
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It is remarkable that these effects did not frighten or deter him, and these early experiments give a first glimpse of the reckless courage and impetuosity that always drove Davy in the laboratory. Nonetheless, it is also notable that he had previously prepared a bladder of oxygen in case of emergency, and Dwyer was instructed to apply it. The publisher Joseph Cottle, who was convinced of Davy’s genius and hoped eventually to print the results of his experiments (in the unlikely event that he survived them), recalled melodramatically: ‘No personal danger restrained him from determining facts, as the data for his reasoning…He seemed to act as if in case of sacrificing one life, he had two or three others in reserve, on which he could fall back in case of necessity…Occasionally I half despaired of seeing him alive the next morning.’
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Finally Davy decided that the properties of nitrous oxide (N
₂
O, or laughing gas) made it the safest and the most promising for trials. He set himself his first experimental research programme, to test different concentrations of the gas: first on himself, then on animals, and finally on other human volunteers. Initially he was especially interested to analyse the
exhaled
air of the lungs, to discover what quantities of the gas were absorbed into the human bloodstream. He devised ingenious equipment to measure and control both inhalations and exhalations: various silk bags and bladders, glass vacuum flasks, a mercurial ‘air-holder and breathing machine’ of cast iron, made by his assistant Clayfield, wooden and metal mouthpieces, corked tubes which could be placed in the nostrils, face-masks and hand pumps, and finally (after nine months) a complete portable gas chamber with entrance and exit valves.
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At first Davy was largely concerned with the process of respiration, and possible therapeutic benefits. Later, with his human subjects, he became more interested in the physiological reactions of the whole body; and effects of pleasure and pain. Finally he became fascinated by purely psychological responses. He wrote proudly to his mother in Penzance: ‘We are going on gloriously. Our palsied patients are getting better; and, to be a little conceited, I am making discoveries every day.’
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He also boasted that he had been invited to contribute poetry to the leading Bristol literary magazine the
Annual Anthology.
It was published by Cottle, and edited by the young poet and one-time Pantisocrat Robert Southey, recently returned from Spain.

4

Nitrous oxide was not without risks. It was considered a lethal gas by both Priestley and the American chemist Dr Samuel Mitchill.
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But Davy went ahead anyway. He heated crystals of ammonium nitrate, collected the gas released in a green oiled-silk bag, passed it through water vapour to remove impurities, then inhaled it through a mouthpiece while his assistant Dr Kinglake monitored his pulse rate.
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The immediate obvious danger was that the ammonium nitrate would explode at a temperature above 400 degrees; the other was that the first inhalations would kill him or permanently damage the linings of his lungs.

But Davy’s first experiment went superbly. After inhaling four quarts of gas, he experienced ‘highly pleasurable thrilling, particularly in the chest and extremities. The objects around me became dazzling, and my hearing more acute.’ The next day the entire experience appeared dreamlike, he could not recall his sensations, and only by rereading his laboratory notes was he convinced that the experiment had taken place at all.
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