11. The Age of Wonder, by Richard Holmes, pp. 295-325

Davy on the Gas, 11-12; Dr Frankenstein and the Soul, 1-3

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Davy's first Bakerian Lecture at the Royal Society, in November 1806, caused an international sensation. The topic was the revolutionary possibilities of the new field of electrochemical analysis. Challenging the notion that electricity was some kind of invisible fluid, he established that it was a form of bipolar energy, with positive and negative charges, and that it could be used to analyze substances into their components, which were entirely new elements. Surveying the scientific work going on elsewhere in Europe, he asserted that British chemistry now led the scientific world. The following November, he announced the discovery of two new elements, potassium and sodium, from his experiments using voltaic batteries to decompose soda and potash. Joseph Banks was so impressed with Davy's work that when he had his portrait painted the following year, he was shown holding a copy of Davy's Bakerian Lectures.

Joseph Banks in 1809, by Thomas Phillips

Banks fell seriously ill soon after these lectures. He had been working on a ventilation system for Newgate Prison and came down a form of typhus known as "jail fever" because it was so easily spread by lice in crowded prisons. He was away from his laboratory until April 1808. During his convalescence, he worked with Coleridge, who had been debilitated by opium, on the lecture series "Poetry and the Imagination," which Coleridge delivered at the Royal Institution in the spring of 1808. Davy also reported a hallucination of a beautiful woman who had nursed him at the height of his fever. He would later claim that he met her again in 1818 and in 1827-28, noting the ten-year cycle of recurrence that took place each time he started a new decade, turning thirty, then forty, then fifty. Holmes notes, "If there had been an earlier one, it would have been in 1798, when he turned twenty, and had just met Anna Beddoes. Anna had returned to her husband and was nursing him when he died in December 1808. After his death, she moved to Bath and then finally settled in Rome. Their son Thomas Lovell Beddoes became a poet, spending twenty-five years on a long poem called Death's Jest-Book, some of the imagery of which was drawn from his childhood memories of his father's laboratory. He committed suicide in 1849, at the age of forty-five.

In 1810 Davy went to Dublin for a series of hugely popular lectures, and he returned in 1811 to receive an honorary doctorate from Trinity College.

In these lectures he particularly stressed the importance of scientific knowledge for women's education, and for "the improvement of the female mind." Milton was wrong on the subject, and Mary Wollstonecraft was right. Among his attentive and admiring audiences was a strikingly pretty and vivacious Scottish widow called Jane Apreece. At a glittering reception afterwards, Jane Apreece told Humphry Davy that she loved fishing. 

In September 1811, Fanny Burney underwent a mastectomy in Paris without anesthetic. It was successful -- she lived twenty years longer -- but the pain was so excruciating that she wrote a 10,000-word letter to her sister about the ordeal, through which she had remained conscious except for "two total chasms in my memory." Even recalling the experience was so painful that it took her two months to write the letter, which is a remarkable glimpse at the the state of medical practice, especially surgery, at the time.

Although France was considered the leader in medicine at the time, England and Scotland were gaining renown, especially for the teaching hospitals of London and Edinburgh. Once again, Banks was concerned with promoting British prestige, and when Astley Cooper of Guy's Hospital perforated a patient's eardrum to treat a potentially fatal infection of the inner ear, Banks had it written up for the Royal Society's Philosophical Transactions. Cooper became a member of the Royal Society and was awarded the Copley Medal in 1814. One of Cooper's students was John Keats. Other Romantic poets also had medical connections: Coleridge was treated by John Abernethy of St. Bartholomew's for his opium addiction, and Joseph Henry Green of Guy's was his amanuensis in 1818. Byron's traveling companion was William Polidori, who had become a doctor at Edinburgh Hospital.

One of Banks's medical protégés was William Lawrence, a young surgeon who worked under John Abernethy at St. Bartholomew's. Lawrence was a specialist in comparative anatomy, and he was elected to the Royal Society at the age of thirty. Two years later, in 1815, he became professor of anatomy at the Royal College of Surgeons. In 1814, Lawrence's mentor, Abernethy, gave a series of lectures known as the Hunterian Orations in honor of John Hunter, who had accumulated a great collection of anatomical specimens. Hunter's collection demonstrated clearly the kinship between human beings and "lower species," leading to the conclusion that mankind had developed out of the animal kingdom. Abernethy had come across papers in Hunter's collection that speculated on the nature of life itself. From these speculations, "Abernethy proposed a theory of human life based on a semi-mystical concept of a universal, physiological life force" and even "suggested that this theory brought scientific evidence -- if not exactly proof -- to the theological notion of the soul." He also connected Davy's experiments with electricity to this theory of the life force.

But in 1816, it was Abernethy's student, Lawrence, who led a vociferous attack on the "life force" theory. Abernethy felt betrayed: Lawrence had been his assistant since the age of sixteen, and had even lodged with Abernethy for three years. Still, Lawrence had also studied anthropology with Johann Friedrich Blumenbach at the University of Göttingen and was well read in French medical literature. "If not an avowed atheist, he had little time for conventional pieties." Blumenbach had not gone so far as to deny the existence of the soul, but his work tended in the direction of a materialist view of life itself. He was also interested in the comparative study of "racial types," and Lawrence had translated Blumenbach's Comparative Anatomy into English in 1807.

Like Abernethy, Lawrence was also friends with a poet: Percy Bysshe Shelley, who consulted Lawrence in July 1815 on a variety of nervous disorders. Shelley, then twenty-two, was grateful for Lawrence's advice and treatment, and by September 1815 began his long poem Alastor, or The Spirit of Solitude about the search for self, wrote some essay on the nature of life and death, and his "Essay on a Future State." He continued seeing Lawrence until he and his wife, Mary, left England for Italy, whose climate Lawrence had recommended, in 1818. 

It was Lawrence who was tapped for the Hunterian Lectures in 1816, and instead of performing the usual courtesy toward the previous lecturer, he began by attacking Abernethy and the theory of the life force. The human body, he asserted, was just "a complex physical organisation. In a phrase that became notorious, he claimed that the development of this physiological organisation could be observed unbroken, 'from an oyster to a man.'" He moved from attacking Abernethy to arguing that science, as Holmes puts it, "had an autonomous right to express its views fearlessly and objectively, without interference from Church or state." In his own words,

It seems to me that this hypothesis or fiction of a subtle invisible matter, animating the visible textures of animal bodies, and directing their motions, is only an example of that propensity in the human mind, which had led men at all times to account for those phenomena, of which the causes are not obvious, by the mysterious aid of higher and imaginary beings.

In 1819, Lawrence continued his attack on Vitalism, as Abernethy's life force theory was called, in a book, Natural History of Man, sparking a debate that had political, social and theological implications, "a premonition of the debate over Darwin's theory of evolution by natural selection, exactly forty years later."

In fact, there was nothing really new about the Vitalism debate. It had been anticipated in the 1780s by the vogue for mesmerism, which had been debunked by a series of blind trials. (Among other things, the trials provided the first demonstration of the "placebo effect," in which patients grew better simply because they believed they were being cured. Vitalism, however, got a boost from the ideas of Friedrich Schelling, who posited that "the whole world was indeed replete with spiritual energy or soul, and all physical objects 'aspired' to become something higher." This theory of evolution by aspiration was eventually laughed into extinction.

In 1803, Giovanni Aldini, a professor of anatomy from Bologna, did a series of public experiments with electricity on corpses, including an attempt to revive a hanged murderer six hours after his execution. The press reported that the electrical charges caused the muscles of the corpse to contract, the left eye to open, the fists to clench, and even made the body blow out a candle several times. "That small, grotesque detail of the opening eye may well have caught a young novelist's imagination." Further experiments on dead animals and "another human corpse which was said to have laughed and walked," caused such an outrage that Aldini was forced to leave the country.

The political implications of this quarrel over Vitalism took their character from the Napoleonic era: "Here was humane, pious English science fighting against cruel, reductive, atheistical French science." The conservative Quarterly Review, which is best known today for its savage attacks on the younger Romantic poets, weighed in with a scathing denunciation of Lawrence: "Mr Lawrence strives with all his powers to prove that men have no souls!" it fumed.

The debate also spread among the poets, and some of their comments, taken out of context, seem to suggest that they came down on the anti-science side. In December 1817, the painter Benjamin Haydon hosted a dinner at which Wordsworth, Charles Lamb, and Keats were present to celebrate Haydon's completion of part of his huge painting of Christ's entry into Jerusalem. The painting included portraits of Wordsworth (representing "natural English piety), Newton ("analytical science")  and Voltaire ("godless French philosophical scepticism"). Keats also appears in profile. Haydon recorded that the conversation centered on a debate over reason versus imagination, with the poets coming down on the side of imagination. He reported that Keats said Newton had "destroyed all the poetry of the rainbow, by reducing it to a prism." But Haydon was a devout fundamentalist Christian who "believed that most science was inevitably godless," and he may have biased his account accordingly.

Wordsworth is often cited as anti-science because of his poem "The Tables Turned," in which he refers to the "meddling intellect" and charges that scientists "murder to dissect." But Wordsworth also regarded Newton as a hero, celebrating him in The Prelude. Shelley, who was not present at the dinner, had previously twitted Haydon for his "religious superstitions" and referred to "that most detestable religion, the Christian." Like Coleridge, Shelley always defended science. Coleridge continued to argue that the soul existed, but he also rejected the idea of a "life force" as a physical fluid of some sort. He wrangled with the notion of the soul, which he identified as "the moral conscience and the spiritual identity."

Keats, from his medical studies under Cooper and J.H. Green, "undoubtedly knew more about medical, chemical and dissection procedures -- as well as the Vitalism debate itself -- than anyone else at Haydon's dinner party. His witticism at Newton's expense could be seen as the typical knowing humor of a clever medical student." But he did express some ambivalence about science in his poetry, particularly in "Lamia."

... Do not all charms fly
At the mere touch of cold philosophy?
There was an awful rainbow once in heaven:
We know her woof, her texture; she is given
In the dull catalogue of common things.
Philosophy will clip an Angel's wings....
Unweave a rainbow, as it erstwhile made
The tender-personed Lamia melt into a shade.

But the poem shows Lamia, a serpent-woman, to be something other than "tender-personed." She is an alien life-form, "both sexually alluring and yet clearly menacing and 'demonic.'" She is unnatural, and a "scientific" approach to her would have unmasked that fact. "Lamia" is a richly ambiguous poem that eventually undermines the anti-scientific position expressed in the lines above. Holmes asserts that the poem "engages many of the moral issues surrounding Vitalism, the nature of life, and the notion of human consciousness. Above all, perhaps, it asks if the beautiful Lamia has a soul." 

10. The Age of Wonder, by Richard Holmes, pp. 265-295

Davy on the Gas, 5-10

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Robert Southey became one of Davy's most influential friends in his Bristol years, encouraging him to continue writing poetry and eventually introducing him to a greater poet, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, whose indulgence in opium naturally led him to want to try nitrous oxide. Coleridge and Davy met in October 1799 and became great friends a month later when Davy visited Coleridge in London. Coleridge introduced David to Charles and Mary Lamb, with whom the poet was living, and to William Godwin, among other prominent literary and artistic figures. Coleridge proclaimed that science, "being necessarily performed with the passion of Hope ... was poetical." Davy enthusiastically agreed.

Davy's experiments with nitrous oxide continued in a portable gas chamber designed by James Watt. It was airtight and allowed for a much longer exposure to the gas. As usual, Davy tried it on himself first: His "pulse rose to 124, his temperature to 106, and his cheeks went bright purple." His assistant, Robert Kinglake, stood by to record Davy's reactions when he emerged from the device, but Davy also recorded the experience in his laboratory notebook, saying that he had been "almost completely intoxicated," that it had been "Inconceivably pleasurable," and the he had "seemed to be a sublime being, newly created and superior to other mortals." He also proclaimed, as Kinglake recorded, "Nothing exists, but Thoughts! -- the Universe is composed of impressions, ideas, pleasures and pains!" He also experimented with combining nitrous oxide with alcohol, drinking a whole bottle of wine along with inhaling the gas. The chief effect was that he got sick but had no hangover the next morning when his "appetite was almost canine." But he began to wonder if the experiments were going a little too far.

In 1800, he published his first book, Researches Chemical and Philosophical chiefly Concerning Nitrous Oxide or Dephlogisticated Nitrous Air, and its Respiration. The publisher was Joseph Johnson, a radical who had also published Godwin, Coleridge, Wordsworth, and Mary Wollstonecraft. In the book he reported on his experiments with live animals, which would later cause Davy some uneasiness, though none of the scientists who reviewed the book objected to this kind of research. In the preface to the book, Davy expressed some concern about his own methodology:

I have endeavoured to guard against sources of error; but I cannot flatter myself that I have altogether avoided them.... Early experience has taught me the folly of hasty generalization. We are ignorant of the laws of corpuscular motion.... Chemistry in its present state, is simply a partial history of phenomena, consisting of many series more or less extensive of accurately connected facts.

In addition to Davy's own self-criticism, there were also attacks on the nitrous oxide experiments from outside, including hints "that the Bristol laboratory witnessed scenes of intoxication, hysteria and even sexual debauchery." An anonymous pamphlet, The Sceptic, in 1800 attacked Beddoes and Davy in particular, suggesting that they used the experiments to seduce women and had even made one woman pregnant while she was under the influence of nitrous oxide.

Davy was himself beginning to doubt Beddoes's theories about the efficacy of inhaling gas, and his interests began to shift to galvanism and the new battery invented by Allesandro Volta. He communicated this interest in a letter to Coleridge, who was developing his ideas about the relationship of science and poetry. Coleridge urged Davy to move to the Lake District with him and Wordsworth, and to establish a laboratory there. For his part, Davy continued to write poetry, some of it about Anna Beddoes, though he never published any of the poems he wrote after 1800, confining them to his notebooks. He did, however, continue to compare the scientific and the poetic imagination in his lectures, and wrote in 1807 some words that suggest the ideas also expressed by Coleridge and Keats:

The perception of truth is almost as simple a feeling as the perception of beauty; and the genius of Newton, of Shakespeare, of Michael Angelo, and of Handel, are not very remote in character from each other. Imagination, as well as the reason, is necessary to perfection in the philosophic mind. A rapidity of combination, a power of perceiving analogies, and of comparing them by facts, is the creative source of discovery. Discrimination and delicacy of sensation, so important in physical research, are other words for taste; and love of nature is the same passion, as the love of the magnificent, the sublime, and the beautiful. 

Benjamin Thompson, Count Rumford, by Thomas Gainsborough, 1783

Davy had begun to attract attention in London, which he visited again in 1801. Banks introduced him to Benjamin Thompson, a Fellow of the Royal Society who had been born in America but fought for the Loyalists and was knighted by George III. In 1785 he moved to Bavaria, where he lived for eleven years and was given the title of Count Rumford by the Elector of Bavaria.

Davy's eagerness to move on from his work with Beddoes in Bristol may have been heightened by his involvement with Anna Beddoes. She was unhappy in her marriage, and he became a confidant in her miseries. They began writing poem to each other, expressing not only affection but also a deep discomfort with the impossibility of furthering their relationship, although hers are more demonstrative than his. The extent of what Holmes calls "this flirtation or frustrated love affair (or whatever it was)" remains unclear. After Davy left Bristol, Anna gave birth to a daughter, Anna Maria, in the spring of 1802, and shortly after that ran off with Davies Giddy, Davy's old friend and patron from Penzance. She returned to Beddoes after several months' absence.

After eighteen months of work with nitrous oxide, Davy finally told Beddoes that he no longer believed there were therapeutic uses for the gas. Unfortunately, Davy had overlooked the fact that nitrous oxide had real potential as an anesthetic. It's not that he was unaware of the fact that it blotted out pain: He had treated his own toothache, caused by impacted wisdom teeth, with nitrous oxide, but "he did not take the next logical step of having the offending teeth removed while under the influence of nitrous oxide." He did note in writing up his experiments that nitrous oxide might be used to ease pain in surgery where there was no great blood loss -- because he believed that the gas was absorbed only through the bloodstream, he thought it would be ineffective if there was a lot of hemorrhaging. He had discussed the problem of pain with Coleridge, who had wondered why childbirth was so painful for human beings since it was essential for the continuation of the species, but again overlooked the potential use of nitrous oxide during labor. Holmes comments, "It would seem that Davy missed the greatest medical opportunity of his early career." It would be more than forty years before surgical anesthesia, using ether, was attempted, and it wasn't finally accepted "until Queen Victoria admitted to having taken a whiff of chloroform during the birth of her son Prince Leopold in April 1853."

Davy left Bristol in March 1801 to become assistant lecturer in chemistry and director of the chemical laboratory at the Royal Institution in London. The Institution, which was founded by Count Rumford, was only two years old and hadn't attracted much notice yet. But Davy's inaugural lecture on April 25 was a sensation: He was a natural educator and showman, as well as a popularizer of science, and the press raved about his presentation, noting also his effect on the many "completely spellbound" young women in the audience. He also published his first paper, on a new form of voltaic battery, in the Royal Society's Philosophical Transactions later that year.

After Davy's departure, Beddoes turned the Pneumatic Institute into a charitable clinic and gave up research. Anna left him for Davies Giddy twice, in 1804 and 1806. Beddoes's protégé continued to attract audiences -- and young women -- to his lectures. Coleridge wrote, "I attended Davy's lectures to enlarge my stock of metaphors.... Every subject in Davy's mind has the principle of Vitality. Living thoughts spring up like Turf under his feet."

In his "Discourse Introductory to a Course of Lectures on Chemistry," Davy proclaimed chemistry's central role in the advancement of science, arguing that all the other sciences, from biology to astronomy, were based on a knowledge of chemical processes. For Davy, science was the only way out of ignorance and superstition, making humankind the master of its fate. But while his argument was revolutionary, Davy was careful not to antagonize the defenders of the established order, the wealthy men who supported the institution for which he worked. He argued that "we do not ... amuse ourselves with brilliant, though delusive dreams of the infinite improveability of man.... We consider only a state of human  progression arising out of its present condition. We look for a time that we may reasonably expect, for a bright day of which we already behold the dawn."

Coleridge was much influenced by Davy's view of science as "psychologically, even spiritually, therapeutic," as Holmes puts it. And Davy's explanation of the "carbon cycle" contributed to Coleridge's idea of harmony in nature. When he and Wordsworth wrote the preface to the third edition of Lyrical Ballads in 1802, they made explicit the analogy of scientific discovery to the poetic imagination.

Davy's success boosted support for the Institution, and apparently boosted his self-confidence. When Maria Edgeworth visited London with Anna Beddoes, Davy showed them around the Institution; Edgeworth commented that Davy "was much improved since I saw him last -- talking sound sense and has left off being the 'cosmology' man." His popularity with women was particularly noted by the caricaturists Rowlandson and Gillray. He was promoted from assistant to full lecturer in 1802, the following year to professor of chemistry. In 1804 he was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society, and his salary had quadrupled, to £400, in just three years. He was invited to give summer lectures at universities, including Dublin, tripling his income.

He was shaken, however, by the death from consumption of his friend Gregory Watt in 1804, and wrote to a frend, "We know very little; but, in my opinion, we know enough to hope for the immortality, the individual immortality of the better part of man." This hope is a far cry from the "certainty of the resurrection" proclaimed by the church's creed. And in the same letter he speculated, "We are masters of the earth, but perhaps we are the slaves of some great and unknown beings," which Holmes observes is "more like the extraterrestrial intelligences of science fiction" than like God, or gods.

In 1805 he lectured at the Royal Institution on geology and spent a summer in the Lake District with Wordsworth, Southey, and Walter Scott -- Coleridge was in Italy. He returned to London to receive the Copley Medal for work on agricultural chemistry. He still had no significant discovery to attach his name to, but "There seemed nothing that could now stop his career, and his meteoric rise to fame at the age of twenty-six."

9. The Age of Wonder, by Richard Holmes, pp. 235-265

Davy on the Gas, 1-4

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In the 1790s, Joseph Banks began hearing about experiments conducted at a "Pneumatic Institute" in Bristol by Thomas Beddoes, a former lecturer at Oxford. They involved experiments on humans, who were breathing in various gases to see what effect they might have on their conditions and diseases. Beddoes was seeking funds for his research, but the nature of the experiments caused Banks to turn him down. But when one of Beddoes's assistants, a twenty-one-year-old chemist from Cornwall named Humphry Davy, came to London in 1801, Banks invited Davy to meet with him.

Davy was mostly self-educated and had never traveled abroad, but he demonstrated an impressive knowledge of the advances in chemistry that had been made in France by Antoine Lavoisier. Davy's father, Robert, had inherited a large estate in Cornwall, where he practiced his skill as a woodcarver. In 1776, he married Grace Millet, who had been raised since the age of five by a surgeon in Penzance, John Tonkin, who had adopted her along with her two sisters when their parents died. Humphry was Robert and Davy's oldest of their five children. Tonkin became Humphry's benefactor (Robert Davy seems to have been somewhat feckless) and paid for his grammar school education in Penzance and later in Truro. But Humphry had to leave school when his father, who was deeply in debt, died suddenly in December 1794.

In February 1795, sixteen-year-old Humphry was indentured to the surgeon and apothecary John Bingham Borlase, who was a friend of Tonkin's. Davy moved into Tonkin's house, and turned his attic rooms into a painting studio and laboratory, with paining and chemical supplies generously supplied by Tonkin. He also took French lessons from an émigré priest who was one of his mother's lodgers, which enabled him to read "the language of Enlightenment science: the language of Laplace, Lamarck and Cuvier; the language of the Encyclopédie and the Biographie Universelle; the language of the Académie des Sciences, the only scientific body which rivalled the Royal Society in London. Above all it was the language of the greatest chemist of the day, Antoine Lavoisier."

Davy's voracious reading turned him into a skeptic and a materialist. He began to write essays denying the existence of the soul and wrote in his notebooks "two supreme declarations of faith.... The first was: 'Man is capable of an infinite degree of Happiness.' The second was: 'The perfectibility of science is absolutely indefinite.'" His "radical ideas about the nature of material reality" led him to a fascination with chemistry. In Tonkin's library he found both a standard English work, William Nicholson's Dictionary of Chemistry, published in 1795, and Antoine Lavoisier's Traité Élémentaire de Chimie, published in 1789.

Humphry Davy, 1803

Chemistry of the time was liberating itself not only from its roots in alchemy, but also from the ancient belief in four basic elements: earth, air, fire, and water. Water had been shown by Lavoisier to be compounded of hydrogen and oxygen in 1785, and his experiment was repeated by Nicholson and Anthony Carlisle in 1800. Fire had been thought to be caused by a substance known as "phlogiston," a theory still held by Joseph Priestley. Lavoisier thought it was the result of the combination of carbon and oxygen in the presence of a substance he called "caloric." Air was known to be composed of oxygen and nitrogen and other gases, and both Priestley and Lavoisier had demonstrated the exchange of oxygen and carbon dioxide between plants and animals, though the full significance of this exchange hadn't yet been made apparent. And the variety of minerals found in earth led to suspicions that it, too, was not a single "element." The undermining of the traditional notion of four elements was revolutionary because "it was counter-intuitive: it went against common sense and common appearances."

Davy recognized that the task of the chemist was to further decompose and analyze substances. Twelve elements had been established, including hydrogen, carbon, oxygen and nitrogen. By 1808, John Dalton was proposing a "Table of 20 Elements," the basis of the the Periodic Table created by Dmitri Mendeleyev in 1869. Banks was eager to establish Great Britain as a leader in chemistry, a task tragically simplified by the execution of France's greatest chemist, Lavoisier, by order of the Revolutionary Convention in 1794, a consequence of his earlier role as a tax collector and a feud with Jean-Paul Marat. Lavoisier had been an anglophile and a devotee of the empirical scientific method promulgated by Francis Bacon. In Lavoisier's words, "We ought to form no idea but what is a necessary consequence, and immediate effect, of an experiment or observation.... We should proceed from known facts to the unknown." This became Davy's creed as well.

John Davy later recalled his brother's early laboratory: "His apparatus consisted chiefly of phials, wine-glasses, teacups, tobacco pipes, and earthen crucibles; and his materials were chiefly the mineral acids and alkalis in common use in medicine. He began his experimental trials in his bedroom in Mr Tonkin's house." In 1797, Tokin took in a new lodger, Gregory Watt, the son of the Scottish engineer James Watt. Gregory wrote home to his father about Davy and his experiments, and Watt in turn wrote to his friend Thomas Beddoes in Bristol. Beddoes had been a lecturer at Oxford, but was forced to resign his fellowship because of his outspoken republican and atheist views. One of his students at Oxford had been Davies Giddy, a Cornishman who also knew Davy.

Thomas Beddoes

Beddoes decided to put an idea he had in effect: the Bristol Pneumatic Medical Institute, which would provide free medical care and research. He was already experimenting with drugs and diet to treat various diseases, and became interested in the chemistry of respiration, theorizing that inhaled gases entering the bloodstream might bring about cures for diseases. Though he applied to Banks for a grant from the Royal Society, he was forced to solicit his funds from private philanthropies, particularly William Henry Lambton, who bankrolled Beddoes's project in exchange for tutorial of his sons. Hearing about Davy, he decided the young man, not yet twenty, would be perfect as an assistant in his research.

Anna Beddoes, 1787

On October 1, 1798, Davy was released from his indenture and became supervisor of Beddoes's institution. In Bristol he met Beddoes's twenty-four-year-old wife, Anna, a pretty, energetic woman who was half-sister to the novelist Maria Edgeworth. Humphry was smitten with his employer's wife. That winter, Thomas Beddoes published Davy's first essays, in one of which he challenged "the imaginary fluid caloric" proposed by Lavoisier. He also wrote an essay, "On Heat, Light and the Combinations of Light," in which he set forth "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." He also speculated that human consciousness was a function of physiological processes, "making an almost metaphysical claim that chemistry might prove to be the path to ultimate knowledge." And in an essay in which he pointed out the interrelationship between oxygen-breathing animals and carbon dioxide breathing plants as suggesting an equilibrium in nature, he anticipated "what is now known as the 'carbon cycle.'"

In the spring of 1799, Davy began a series of experiments with gas inhalations. For the first time, he had a well-equipped laboratory, including gas-inhalation equipment which was designed for him by James Watt and based on balloon technology. He studied the work of human respiration and then tried the effects of inhaling hydrogen, carbon dioxide, carbon monoxide, and nitrous gases. Before subjecting any of his patients to the tests, he tried them out himself, nearly killing himself with carbon monoxide, as well as suffering fainting fits, nausea, and headaches. Fortunately, he kept a supply of oxygen at hand.  He finally settled on nitrous oxide, or laughing gas, as the most promising gas for trials.

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. 

There were risks to using nitrous oxide, which some, including Priestley, considered lethal, and the ammonium nitrate that was heated to produce it could explode. But Davy went ahead with it and experienced giddiness and euphoria. He wrote a poem about it:

Not in the ideal dreams of wild desire
Have I beheld a rapture-waking form;
My bosom burns with no unhallowed fire:
Yet is my cheek with rosy blushes warm
Yet are my eyes with sparkling lustre filled
Yet is my mouth replete with murmuring sound
Yet are my limbs with inward transport thrilled
And clad with newborn mightiness around.

He began regularly experimenting with nitrous oxide, carefully annotating his physical and emotional reactions to the gas, noting once that "he was 'more irritable than usual,' though that might have had other 'moral' causes. In retrospect it appears that these 'moral causes' might have been connected with Anna Beddoes." One evening he decided to take a larger dose than usual, during which he briefly lost consciousness. He was disappointed that the gas gave him no spiritual revelation or insight into the universe, which may have made him overlook the potential of the gas as an anesthetic.

In May 1799 he began clinical trials on the institution's patients. He pioneered the use of "blind" trials by not telling the patients how much nitrous oxide they were inhaling or even if they were actually inhaling plain air, as some of them were. He was fascinated by the hallucinogenic effects of the gas, and began to glimpse the possibility of its anesthetic use in surgery. In addition to patients, he also tried it out on friends and family, including Anna Beddoes. In a couple of instance women who inhaled the gas had such extreme, even hysterical reactions that it launched the notion that the gas could be used to make women lose their inhibitions and become sexually aroused.  Among others who partook of the gas were Robert Southey, several members of the Edgeworth family, Gregory and James Watt, and Peter Mark Roget, who would go on to compile the eponymous thesaurus. Southey reported that the gas made him "gloriously happy!" Maria Edgeworth visited her half-sister at the time and observed that Anna showed unusual "grace, genius, vivacity, and kindness."

Cartoon by James Gillray, "Scientific Researches! - New Discoveries in Pneumaticks! - or - an Experimental Lecture on the Powers of Air" (1802).  Davy is shown with the bellows behind the desk.