At the Medical Edge or, The Beddoes Effect

Stewart, Larry

doi:10.1007/978-3-319-58436-2_3

At the Medical Edge or, The Beddoes Effect

Larry Stewart⁴

Chapter
First Online: 06 July 2017

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Part of the book series: Archimedes ((ARIM,volume 52))

Abstract

When Thomas Beddoes explored new developments in pneumatic chemistry in the late eighteenth century, he was far from alone. Following upon widespread interest in newly-identified gasses, Beddoes and James Watt developed a campaign to promote the application of breathing new airs to attack medical ailments like consumption. But there were many others throughout the English Midlands, in London’s metropolis, in spa towns as well as on the Continent. Many medics, like Robert Thornton, James Percival, Erasmus Darwin, and John Barr among others, were convinced of the efficacy of airs. Such were the innovators who took advantage of new chemical discoveries. It was Beddoes’ unrelenting promotion of chemical innovation that attracted much attention. Likewise, Beddoes became an enthusiastic proponent of the uses of galvanic electricity in a sweeping range of ailments especially as pneumatic medicine proved not as promising as the first enthusiasm had suggested. Here too Beddoes reflected on the power of electrical discoveries, promoted likewise by Tiberius Cavallo who sought advantage in the market for electrical apparatus and by Michael La Beaume in London who developed a socially-respectable reputation as medical galvanist. By the late eighteenth century innovation in chemistry and electricity was often innovation in medicine, and Beddoes was its public champion.

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Notes

1.
Birmingham Central Library [BCL], James Watt Papers 4/12/28. Watt to Joseph Black, May 15, 1794. Reproduced in Robert G.W. Anderson and Jean Jones, eds., The Correspondence of Joseph Black, 2 (Farnham: Ashgate, 2012), 1236–1237.
2.
Cf. Steve Fuller, Science (Durham: Acumen, 2010), chapter 8.
3.
Trevor H. Levere, “Dr. Thomas Beddoes at Oxford: Radical politics in 1788–1793 and the fate of the Regius Chair in Chemistry,” Ambix 28 (1981), 61–69, reprinted in Levere, Chemists and Chemistry in Nature and Society 1770–1878 (Aldershot: Variorum, 1994).
4.
BCL, James Watt Papers [JWP], W/9/7. Beddoes to James Watt, April 21, [1796?]. He expressed the identical sentiment to Davies-Gilbert in 1798. See Cornwall Record Office, Davies-Gilbert Correspondence, DG 42/2. Beddoes to Giddy, April 14, 1798; DG 42. Beddoes to Giddy, June 1, 1798.
5.
Victor D. Boantza, “Collecting airs and ideas: Priestley’s style of experimental reasoning,” Studies in History and Philosophy of Science 38 (2007), 506–522; and Boantza, “The rise and fall of nitrous air eudiometry: Enlightenment ideals, embodied skills, and the conflicts of experimental philosophy,” History of Science 51 (December, 2013), 377–412. (I wish to thank Dr. Boantza for providing me with an early draft of his essay).
6.
Robert E. Schofield, ed., A Scientific Autobiography of Joseph Priestley, 1733–1804: Selected Scientific Correspondence, with Commentary (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1966), 161–162. Priestley to Boulton, before November, 1777.
7.
BCL, JWP 4/48/7. Percival to Watt, September 16, 1786. On Percival, see Trevor Levere and Gerard L’E Turner, Discussing Chemistry and Steam. The Minutes of a Coffee House Philosophical Society 1780–1787 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002), and Trevor Levere, Larry Stewart, and Hugh Torrens, The Enlightenment of Thomas Beddoes. Science, medicine and reform (London and New York: Routledge, 2017).
8.
On John Ewart see Larry Stewart, “His Majesty’s Subjects: From Laboratory to Human Experiment in Pneumatic Chemistry,” Notes & Records of the Royal Society, 63 (September, 2009), 231–245, esp. 231–232; and Thomas Beddoes, M.D. and James Watt, Engineer, Considerations of the Medicinal Use and Production of Factitious Airs. Part III. Second edition, corrected, and enlarged (London: Printed for J. Johnson, St. Paul’s Church-Yard, 1796), 23, 24, 101, 155. On Lind see BCL, JWP 4/23/19. Beddoes to Lind, Sept. 23, [1794?]; 4/23/20. Beddoes to Watt, Sept. 18, [1794?].
9.
BCL, JWP 4/23/13. Barr to Watt, September 20, 1795.
10.
On Scott see Mark Harrison, “Medical experimentation in British India. The case of Helenus Scott,“in Hormoz Ebrhaminejad, ed., The Development of Modern Medicine in Non-Western Countries (London and New York: Routledge, 2009), 23–41; also Guelph University Library, XS1 MS A164/ 94, James Dinwiddie Correspondence, Helenus Scott to James Dinwiddie, August 23, 1796; On Saunders see Jan Golinski, Science as Public Culture. Chemistry and Enlightenment, 1760–1820 (Cambridge and London: Cambridge University Press, 1992), 61; BCL, JWP 4/23/28. Beddoes to Watt, July 7, [1794]; See also [Robert Thornton], The Philosophy of Medicine: Or, Medical Extracts on the Nature of Health and Disease, Including the Laws of the Animal Oeconomy, and the Doctrines of Pneumatic Medicine. 5 (London: Printed by C. Whittingham, Dean-street, Fetter-Lane, 1800), 388–391.
11.
BCL, JWP 4/23/25. Beddoes to Watt, August 21, 1794.
12.
Thomas Beddoes and James Watt, Considerations on the Medicinal Use, and on the Production of Factitious Airs. Part I. By Thomas Beddoes, M.D. Part II. By James Watt, Engineer. Edition the Third. Corrected and Enlarged. (Bristol: Printed by Bulgin and Rosser, For J. Johnson, in St. Paul’s Church-Yard, London, 1796), 222. Chippendale’s brother apparently tried the breathing apparatus of Robert Thornton in London but complained the vital air “had done him harm.” BCL, JWP 4/23/15. Robert Thornton to Beddoes?, August 27, 1795.
13.
Cf. Michael Neve, “Orthodoxy and Fringe: Medicine in Late Georgian Bristol,” in W.F. Bynum and Roy Porter, eds., Medical Fringe & Medical Orthodoxy 1750–1850 (London and Sydney: Croom Helm, 1987), 40–55, esp. 48ff.
14.
On the hopes of Watt and Beddoes and concerns over the damage Beddoes’ republicanism did to their project see David Philip Miller and Trevor H. Levere, “‘Inhale it and See?’ The Collaboration between Thomas Beddoes and James Watt in Pneumatic Medicine,” Ambix 55 (March, 2008), 1–24; Michael Neve, “Orthodoxy and Fringe,” 48.
15.
For his lectures before the Spitalfields Mathematical Society, see Dalhousie University Library, MS 2–726, B75. Dinwiddie fonds, Journal, May 19, 1808; Jan Golinski, “From Calcutta to London: James Dinwiddie’s Galvanic Circuits,” in Bernard Lightman, Gordon McOuat and Larry Stewart, eds. The Circulation of Knowledge Between Britain, Indian and China. The Early-Modern World to the Twentieth Century (Leiden and Boston: Brill, 2013), 75–94, at 89, n. 61.
16.
BCL, JWP 4/65/2. Thornton to James Watt, July 22, 1795.
17.
BCL, JWP 4/65/6. Darwin to Watt, April 29, 1795.
18.
BCL, JWP 4/65/7. Beddoes to Watt, December 12, 1794.
19.
BCL, JWP 4/65/7. Beddoes to Watt, Nov. 15, 1794. Eye disease particularly seemed to have been one of the problems attracting new methods of treatment, however controversial. See Neve, “Orthodoxy and Fringe,” 45.
20.
BCL. JWP 4/65/5. Thornton to Watt, July 13, 1795.
21.
On Fontana see Simon Schaffer, “Measuring virtue: eudiometry, enlightenment and pneumatic medicine,” in Andrew Cunningham and Roger French, eds. The medical enlightenment of the eighteenth century (Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 1990), 281–318.
22.
BCL, JWP 4/23/14. Thornton to Watt, September 27, 1795?; JWP 4/23/8. Beddoes to Watt, on Mrs. Keir. October 30, 1794? On Girtanner, see David M. Knight, Dictionary of Scientific Biography, 5, 411; Robert John Thornton, Medical extracts. On the nature of health, and the laws of the nervous and fibrous systems (London, 1798), 1, 73.
23.
BCL, JWP, Copy Books, Watt to Beddoes, October 20, 1797.
24.
See, for example, BCL, JWP Copy Books, Watt to James Watt, jun., November 16, 1797.
25.
On Crawford see Trevor Levere and Gerard L’E Turner, Discussing Chemistry and Steam. The Minutes of a Coffee House Philosophical Society (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002); Claire L. Nutt, ‘Crawford, Adair (1748–1795)’, Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, Oxford University Press, 2004 [http://www.oxforddnb.com/view/article/6637, accessed 25 May 2013]; Larry Stewart, “Pneumatic Chemistry, Self-Experimentation and the Burden of Revolution, 1780–1805,” in Erika Dyck and Larry Stewart, eds., The Uses of Humans in Experiment. Perspectives from the 17th to the twentieth Century. Clio Medica 95 (Leiden and Boston; Brill, Rodolpi, 2017), 139–169, esp. 136–137; Stewart, “A Jacobin cloven foot,” in Trevor Levere, Larry Stewart and Hugh Torrens, The Enlightenment of Thomas Beddoes. Science, medicine, and reform (London and New York: Routledge, 2016), 143–144.
26.
BCL, JWP 4/23/15 (3). Thornton to Beddoes, August 20, 1795 encl. in Beddoes to Watt, August 27, 1795. My italics.
27.
[Robert Thornton], The Philosophy of Medicine: Or, Medical Extracts on the Nature of Health and Disease, Including the Laws of the Animal Oeconomy, and the Doctrines of Pneumatic Medicine. Vol. I (London: Printed by C. Whittingham, Dean-street, Fetter-Lane, 1799), 427.
28.
Harrison, “Medical experimentation in British India,” 34–35. On Cruickshank see William Blair, Essays on the Venereal Disease (London: J. Johnson, 1798), 35, 50ff; [Robert Thornton], The Philosophy of Medicine, Lance Day and Ian McNeil, eds., Biographical Dictionary of the History of Technology (London: Routledge, 1996), 181–2; A Journal of Natural Philosophy, Chemistry & the Arts, ed. William Nicholson, V (September, 1801), 201–211; A. Coutts, “William Cruickshank of Woolwich”, Annals of Science 15 (1959), 121–133; K. D. Watson, ‘Cruickshank, William (d. 1810/11)’, Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, Oxford University Press, 2004; online edn, Jan 2008 [http://www.oxforddnb.com/view/article/57592, accessed 25 May 2013]; cf. Thomas Garnett, Popular Lecture on Zoonomia, or the Laws of Animal Life (London, 1804); William Henry, An Epitome of Chemistry (London, 1801).
29.
Thomas Beddoes, M.D.[published by], Reports principally concerning the Effects of the Nitrous Acid in the Venereal Disease, By the Surgeons of the Royal Hospital at Plymouth, and By Other Practitioners (Bristol, Printed by N. Biggs, For J. Johnson, St. Paul’s Church-yard, London, 1797).
30.
An original of the printed circular is in Cornwall Record Office, Davies-Gilbert MSS. 42/3, September 5, 1797.
31.
BCL, JWP 4/23/15. Beddoes to Watt, December 26, 1795. Watt thought Beddoes’ “incorrigble.” See JWP 4/12/18. Watt to Joseph Black, October 9, 1796.
32.
CRO, DG 42/2. Beddoes to Giddy, April 14, 1798. On Beddoes’s science and his politics see Levere, Stewart and Torrens, The Enlightenment of Thomas Beddoes (2017).
33.
BCL, James Watt Papers, 4/23/5. Beddoes to Watt, January 1, 1795; 4/23/8. Beddoes to Watt, October 30, 1795.
34.
Quoted in Golinski, Science as Public Culture, 168. According to Watt, Mrs. Beddoes was thought to have “an incipient consumption, of which she was cured by Digitalis.” BCL, JWP Copy Books, Watt to Joseph Black, December 8, 1799, reprinted in Anderson and Jean Jones, eds., The Correspondence of Joseph Black, 2, 1386.
35.
See Guiliano Pancaldi, “On Hybrid Objects and their Trajectories: Beddoes, Davy and the Battery,” Notes & Records of the Royal Society, 63 (September, 2009), 247–262; also Jan Golinski, “From Calcutta to London: James Dinwiddie’s Galvanic Circuits,” in B. Lightman, G. McOuat, and L. Stewart, eds., Circulating Knowledge, East and West (Leyden: Brill, 2013), 74–94.
36.
See Paola Bertucci, “Therapeutic Attractions: Early Applications of Electricity to the Art of Healing,” in Henry Whittaker, C.U.M. Smith and Stanley Finger, eds., Mind, Brain and Medicine. Essays in Eighteenth-Century Neuroscience (New York: Springer, 2007), 271–283.
37.
CRO, DG 41/19. Beddoes to Giddy, September 12, 1792.
38.
See Roy Porter, “Taking histories, medical lives: Thomas Beddoes and biography,” in Michael Shortland and Richard Yeo, eds., Telling Lives in Science. Essays on Scientific Biography (Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 1996), 215–242, esp. 227–229; Roy Porter, Quacks. Fakers & Charlatans in English Medicine (Stroud and Charleston, SC.: Tempus Publishing, 2000), 168–169, 176–177.
39.
BCL, JWP Copy Books, Watt to Cavallo, February 9, 1798.
40.
Schaffer, “Measuring virtue,” 309, 313.
41.
Tiberius Cavallo, An Essay on the Medicinal Properties of Factitious Airs. With an Appendix on the Nature of Blood (London: Printed for the Author, And sold by C. Dilly, in the Poultry; P. Emsley and D. Bremner, in the Strand, 1798), 33–34.
42.
Cavallo, An Essay on the Medicinal Properties of Factitious Airs, 149ff.
43.
BL., Add Mss. 22,897, ‘Letters of Tiberius Cavallo’, Cavallo to Lind, June 10, 1792.
44.
On which, see Tiberius Cavallo, The Elements of Natural or Experimental Philosophy, vol. II, ed. F.X. Brosius (Philadelphia: Dobson, 1813), 190–199. https://babel.hathitrust.org; and Giuliano Pancaldi, Volta. Science and Culture in the Age of Enlightenment (Princeton and Oxford: Princeton University Press, 2003).
45.
BCL, JWP, W/9/9. Partington to Watt, January 24 [likely 1798].
46.
BCL, JWP W/9/11. Cavallo to Lind, January 15, 1798.
47.
BL., Add Mss. 22,897, ‘Letters of Tiberius Cavallo’, Cavallo to Lind, July 2, 1796; February 22, 1797; March? 1797; June 17, 1797.
48.
BCL, JWP 4/65/21. Lind to Watt, February 20, 1795.
49.
BL., Add Mss. 22,897, ‘Letters of Tiberius Cavallo’, Cavallo to Lind, June 13, 1800.
50.
See Paul Elliott, “‘More Subtle than the Electrical Aura’: Georgian Medical Electricity, the Spirit of Animation and the Development of Erasmus Darwin’s Psychophysiology,” Medical History, 52 (2008), 195–220, esp. 213–214.
51.
Cf. [anon], “Observations and Experiments on the Galvanic Power,” in William Nicholson, ed., A Journal of Natural Philosophy, Chemistry and The Arts. V (May, 1801), 41–45, esp. 44; “Electric Shock by means of Galvanism,” 80.
52.
On La Beaume see Alan Rauch, Useful Knowledge. The Victorians, Morality, and the March of Intellect (Durham and London: Duke University Press, 2001), 107–108. He was, from 1843, apparently running the Galvanic and Electric Institution in Argyle Street, Regent Street. It appears La Beaume was declared bankrupt by 1847. See The Jurist, 11 (2), (London, 1848), 217.
53.
See La Beaume, On Galvanism with Observations on Its Chymical Properties and Medical Efficacy (London, 1826).
54.
On Aldini see Rob Iliffe, “Galvanic Humans,” in Erika Dyck and Larry Stewart, eds., The Uses of Humans in Experiment. Perspectives from the 17th to the twentieth Century (Leiden and Boston: Brill/Rodopi, 2016), 52–79.
55.
M. La Beaume, ‘Communication’ in D. Uwins, S. Palmer and Mr. Gray, eds., The London Medical Repository, Monthly Journal, and Review, 12 (1819), 256–260.
56.
M. LA BEAUME, Medical and Surgical Electrician, F.L.S. &c, Observations on the Properties of the Air-Pump Vapour-Bath, in the Cure of Gout, Rheumatism, Palsy, &c with Occasional Remarks on the Efficacy of Galvanism, in Disorders of the Stomach, Liver, & Bowels, with some New and Remarkable Cases. Second edition, Greatly Enlarged (London: F. Warr, 1819), 265–266.
57.
M. La Beaume, Remarks on the History and Philosophy, but Particularly on the Medical Efficacy of Electricity, in the Cure of Nervous and Chronic Disorders; And in Various Local Affections, As Blindness, Deafness, &c. Illustrated with many New and Striking Cases: Together with Observations on Galvanism, as an Efficient Substitute for Mercurial Remedies, In Bilious and Stomach Complaints. Dedicated by Permission, To His Royal Highness Prince Leopold of Saxe Coburg, &c. Second Edition, Greatly Enlarged. (London: F. Warr, Red Lion 1820), 365–367. The reference is to Richard Reece’s Medical Hall, 168–171 Piccadilly, near Bond Street. Cf. Marieke M.A. Hendrikson, “Consumer Culture, Self-Prescription, and Status: Nineteenth-Century Medicine Chests in the Royal Navy,” Journal of Victorian Culture, 20 (2015), 147–167.
58.
La Beaume, Remarks on the History and Philosophy, but Particularly on the Medical Efficacy of Electricity, 341–342.
59.
On the orchestrated abuse directed at Beddoes see Jan Golinski, The Experimental Self. Humphry Davy and the Making of a Man of Science (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 2016), 39–41.
60.
‘M. La Beaume’s New Galvanic Batteries’, in Mechanics Magazine, Museum, Register, Journal, and Gazetter, 175 (Saturday, December 30, 1826), 549–551.
61.
Medical Times and Gazette 12 (1856); Gentleman’s Magazine (1831); A.M. Cooke, “Queen Victoria’s Medical Household,” Medical History 26 (1982), 307–320, esp. 319.
62.
London Gazette (1847), Court of Bankruptcy, where he petitioned for protection from the bankruptcy process and was described as a medical electrician residing in Penzance and Cornwall.
63.
Thomas Beddoes, M.D., A Letter to Erasmus Darwin, M.D. ON A New Method of Treating Pulmonary Consumption, and Some other Diseases hitherto found Incurable. (Bristol: Printed by Bulgin and Rosser, Broad-Street; Sold by J. Murray, No. 32, Fleet-street, and J. Johnson, No. 72, St. Paul’s Church-yard, London; also by Bulgin and Sheppard, J. Norton, J. Cottle, W. Browne and T. Mills, Booksellers, Bristol). [1793], 3–5; See also Thomas Beddoes, M.D., Observations on the Nature and Cure of Calculus, Sea Scurvy, Consumption, Catarrh, and Fever: Together with Conjectures Upon Several Other Subjects of Physiology and Pathology (London, Printed for J. Murray, no. 32 Fleet Street, 1793).
64.
BCL, JWP Copy books, Watt to Robison, January 30, 1798.

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Larry Stewart

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Stewart, L. (2017). At the Medical Edge or, The Beddoes Effect. In: Buchwald, J., Stewart, L. (eds) The Romance of Science: Essays in Honour of Trevor H. Levere. Archimedes, vol 52. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-58436-2_3

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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-58436-2_3
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