Mike Jay, Free Radicals: How a Group of Romantic Experimenters Gave Birth to Psychedelic Science (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2025) 382 pp. + 27 bw illustrations, $22.00 PB, ISBN: 9780300282610.
Mike Jay’s Free Radicals: How a Group of Romantic Experimenters Gave Birth to Psychedelic Science purports to be a ‘revised and updated edition’ of his 2009 publication Atmosphere of Heaven: The Unnatural Experiments of Dr. Beddoes and his Sons of Genius (MikeJay.net). This new book, however, appears little changed, and there is no introduction to provide an overview of the revisions. Structurally, it remains the same, with an opening prologue set on Bastille Day 1791, two parts comprising four chapters each, and an epilogue following Thomas Beddoes’s death. The primary difference seems to be the dates appended parenthetically after each chapter title, which clearly signals the book’s chronological progression. One cannot help but wonder if Jay changed the title because previous reviewers noted that only one chapter featured the ‘unnatural experiments’ promised in the earlier edition’s subtitle. Nonetheless, the addition of dates proves useful for readers who like to know precisely when events happened and how they coincided and intersected with each other. Furthermore, Jay’s heady tale of pneumatic science during the first two decades of the Romantic period remains, as earlier reviewers emphasized, engaging and readable.
The prologue, which describes the Birmingham riots that eventually drove the ‘fiery iconoclast’ Joseph Priestley out of England, sets the tone for the rest of the book with its rich prose and its engaging historical detail (1). Noting that the ‘mob’s fury had been carefully selected to target the dissenting community’, Jay quickly and unobtrusively establishes a connection between science and nonconformity, which explains the ongoing conservative hostility towards the experimenters and projects detailed in the following pages (3). The prologue also prepares readers to understand later chapters, including how Beddoes, an avowed atheist, found kinship with religious dissenters and why he settled in Bristol.
Part One covers the period from 1791-1796, beginning with the early stages of Beddoes’ career as a chemical reader at Oxford, tracing his friendship with Davies Giddy, his developing interest in pneumatic medicine, and his benevolent politics. Jay establishes the motive that drove the formation of the Pneumatic Institute—the desire to conduct medical research while also helping people of all classes who suffered from respiratory ailments, especially laborers and others unable to afford medical care. In addition to introducing important figures in science and industry who significantly influenced Beddoes—Erasmus Darwin, James Watt, Matthew Boulton, for example—Jay elucidates how the political events of the period shaped their philosophical and social commitments. The first part assembles the cast of characters, all committed to the causes of liberty and alleviating human misery, who clustered around Beddoes and formed the Bristol Circle, including people such as Thomas Wedgwood, the Edgeworths, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, and Robert Southey. It makes clear how and why Beddoes conceived of establishing the Pneumatic Institution and the enormous amount of work that went into getting it running.
Part Two, which covers 1796 to 1809, introduces Humphry Davy, providing almost as much detail about him as about the book’s protagonist. It also details the thrilling and sometimes comical experiments with the ‘Wild Gas’ (Chapter 6) and the skepticism of those outside Bristol, particularly figures such as James Gillray, the Anti-Jacobin Review, Edmund Burke, and Sir Joseph Banks. Political and scientific conservatives ridiculed Beddoes and his associates, using the uncontrolled outbursts associated with nitrous oxide as a metaphor for the dangers of revolution. ‘New Worlds’ (Chapter 7) tackles sensational and idealist philosophy, arguing that Davy’s and Coleridge’s experiences with the gas made them more amenable to Kantian metaphysics. Jay does justice to Beddoes’ influence on these younger men by describing his polymathic learning, his command of several European languages, and his extensive library of over ‘six thousand items’, including Kant’s writings (313). This section covers the most well-trod ground in the history of Romantic chemistry—Davy’s defection from Bristol to the Royal Institute in London. Mindful that Beddoes has often been treated as an amusing footnote by Davy’s and Coleridge’s biographers, Jay carefully sets the record straight. He acknowledges that the young chemist did Beddoes no good when he denounced Brunonian theory and pneumatic medicine in his published report on the nitrous trials, but he dispels the myth that Beddoes faded into obscurity as a result. Citing Institution surgeon John King’s records, he cogently demonstrates that ‘with over eight thousand cases’ by 1804, Beddoes’s services continued to be in high demand (300). Around this time, Beddoes began to shift away from pneumatic medicine to focus more of his attention on the poorest members of society. In addition to opening a surgery in Bristol’s slums, where it was most needed, he changed the institution’s name to the Medical Institution for the Benefit of the Sick and Drooping Poor.
Jay successfully countermands Beddoes’s image as a buffoon without overstating or aggrandizing his contributions to medical history. For example, he provides a sound rationale for the cow-house experiments that had Wedgwood sleeping next to a cattle stall. Not only had Beddoes observed that butchers, who spent considerable time among cows, rarely got consumption, he also began ‘to recognise that, for pneumatic therapies to be as effective as those received via the skin or stomach, they needed to be administered constantly over a long period’ (255). Jay also explains why Beddoes and Davy failed to pursue nitrous oxide’s anesthetic potential. Beddoes’s opinion that patients should not suffer undue pain was atypical in the late eighteenth century and was criticized by other medical professionals. In the final chapter, he discusses Beddoes’s Letter to the Right Honourable Sir Joseph Banks that proposes largescale medical reform. Even though it outlines a ‘programme that would transform medicine in the century to come’, Jay does not attribute the change to Beddoes alone, noting instead that his ‘vision, science, medicine, and politics were no longer in conflict with but flowing in the same direction’ as mainstream medical science (309). He thus situates Beddoes as an important figure in the history of science and medicine, from which he was excluded throughout much of the twentieth century. (Dorothy A. Stansfield’s Thomas Beddoes, M.D., 1760-1808 [D. Reidel, 1984] and Roy Porter’s Doctor of Society: Thomas Beddoes and the Sick Trade in Late-Enlightenment England [Routledge, 1992] are notable exceptions.)
The Epilogue revisits Davy near the end of his life in 1828-1829, twenty years after Beddoes’s death, briefly recounting his embittered and unhappy career after leaving the Pneumatic Institution. Jay argues that the ‘spirit of the 1820s had become far more sympathetic to Beddoes than to Davy’, thanks in part to the sons of genius he had mentored (323). In the final pages, he traces the afterlife of nitrous oxide as a sideshow novelty in the 1830s, an anesthetic for dentists beginning in the 1860s, and highlights its role in shaping William James’s psychological insights in the 1870s.
The capacious, weblike structure of Jay’s narrative incorporates considerable information, from political events to sociohistorical conditions to personal anecdotes, and binds them with mostly insightful social commentary. While he provides a nuanced account of history by explaining how government policies, wars, poor harvests, and so forth, together, created the conditions for the free radicals’ discoveries, he also entertains us with gossipy tidbits about Anna Beddoes’s sexual frustrations and Beddoes’s enlightened response to her flirtations, Southey and Coleridge’s falling out, and the often hilarious experiments with the ‘excellent air-bag!’ (Davy qtd. 222). Occasionally, he demonstrates admirable awareness beyond the scope of the men whose careers he follows, such as when he recognizes that N2O’s ‘effect on some female subjects [not only] exaggerated … gender bias’ inherent in the Bristol Circle, but also that their response was undoubtedly inhibited by the oppressive social strictures that censured women who let go of their inhibitions as freely as the male subjects who tried it (230). Other times, Jay blunders, as when he attributes negative views of Beddoes to ‘the Chinese[!] whispers’ of Davy’s and Coleridge’s biographers (295) or when he attributes Anna Beddoes’s discontentment with her marriage to ‘childlessness’, which ‘left her feeling bereft’ and ostensibly cleared up when she gave birth to their first child (289). This claim is belied a few pages later when we learn that she and Giddy harbored a passion for each other until Beddoes’s death (303).
Nonetheless, I highly recommend Free Radicals as a commendable endeavor and eminently readable book that appeals to a wide audience, including general readers interested in the history of science or who just want to learn history in an accessible and engaging way. It also benefits scholars of Romanticism who want to learn more about Beddoes and the Bristol Circle. Usefully, it includes brief summaries of all Beddoes’s publications. It is well researched, written in lively prose, and adopts a tone that does justice to this most exciting period of British history. Available in paperback only, this affordable book promises to reward the time and attention spent on it.
Lisa Ann Robertson, University of South Dakota
