Radical Science in Britain, 1790–1830

Abstract

It was the misfortune of Dr Thomas Beddoes to make enemies nearly as easily as he made friends. In November, 1792, a confidential note was passed to Mr Isaac Hawkins Browne, of Badgere near Shiffnall, from the permanent Under Secretary at the Home Office, Sir Evan Nepean. It reports that Beddoes was sowing sedition in Browne’s area and seeks information.¹ A few months earlier a question had arisen of Beddoes’ promotion at Oxford from his self-styled Readership to an official Chair. A local JP, C. Willoughby, of Baldon House, did not consider Beddoes to be ‘deserving of his Majesty’s bounty’; although a good chemist ‘he is a most violent Democrat and … he takes great pains to seduce young men to the same political principles with himself’.² With political unpopularity matched by declining student numbers (and therefore fees) Beddoes was to find Oxford an inhospitable place,³ and in 1793 he moved to Bristol to found his Pneumatic Institution.⁴ Beddoes sought patients with respiratory disorders who might be cured by the use of various gases, and he knew that such sufferers flocked in their hundreds to the spas of Bath and Bristol (Hotwells).