Abstract
In this chapter discusses the self-experimentation undertaken at Beddoes’s Pneumatic Institution, and especially the nitrous oxide trials. Both Beddoes’s and Davy’s experimental texts describe various states and behaviours that were usually associated with disability (irrationality, spastic movements, uncontrollable laughter, stuttering, mutism) as coincident to or productive of aesthetically significant experiences. To participate in self-experimentation is to accept the possibility, or even the likelihood, of pain, injury, and other forms of non-normative embodiment. For experimenters including Beddoes, Davy, Tom Wedgwood, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, and Robert Southey, deviant embodiment paid rich dividends: many compared their experiences to the sublime, and even those who reported painful sensations were inspired to rich linguistic experimentation during and after the trials—including, I argue, in such literary works as ‘Christabel’.
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Notes
- 1.
As Jan Golinski has pointed out, an obituary that appeared in the Gentlemen’s Magazine after Beddoes’s death in 1808 repeated attacks leveled against him after the nitrous oxide trials—and although Davy largely refashioned himself and his reputation after leaving Bristol for London in 1801, “[h]e did not entirely succeed…because the incident” (nitrous oxide experimentation) “was still brought up in an attack on him as late as 1824,” five years before his death (Science 175).
- 2.
Beddoes’s biographer Dorothy A. Stansfield writes of the Pneumatic Institution that “often it is pointed out as the place where Humphry Davy began his career or, less seriously, as the scene of foolish episodes in which nitrous oxide was breathed for the sake of a novel and amusing experience” (1). When examined in literary or philosophical contexts these “novel” experiences have taken on a measure of seriousness for recent readers. Some scholars of Romantic literature and culture have regarded the Pneumatic Institution collaborators as “an elitist drug circle” (Lefebure 179), one in which the pleasures of intoxication led to new aesthetic experiences. Mike Jay and others have characterized their uncontrollable, erratic behaviors as transgressive moments at which manners and social norms were temporarily suspended (182).
- 3.
The latter text was written in two parts; the second half was authored by inventor and engineer James Watt.
- 4.
Neil Vickers offers a relevant treatment of Beddoes and Brunonian medicine in “Coleridge, Thomas Beddoes and Brunonian Medicine.” In it Vickers not only explores Beddoes’s relationship with John Brown’s medical principles, but also the radical political valences of Brunonian medicine and its influence on Coleridge.
- 5.
Among other things that Beddoes fails to fully explain away are Mrs. Barbauld’s “languor” (it was due to an improper dose of the gas) (Notice 9); reports of a “disagreeable” sensation (it often is due to not having inhaled enough gas) (10); Mr. Notcutt’s second reaction to the gas, feeling “languid” (this may have been due to “exercise in oppressively hot weather” or an improperly “strong” dose of gas) (12); and Tom and Josiah Wedgwood’s “rather unpleasant feelings” (he attributes these to the poor “quality of the air breathed by both”) (13).
- 6.
In the contexts of illness and disability this set of issues has much more pressing ethical implications. As the nineteenth century progressed, standardized medical tests and technologies—and the professionals who alone had the authority to interpret the results—further supplanted patient narratives. See G. Thomas Couser, Arthur Frank, and Ann Hunsaker Hawkins on illness narratives and Eliot Freidson on medical authority. It is also worth noting that it matters little whether Beddoes was correct about nitrous oxide’s effects. In 1799, the gas’s impact was unknown—yet Beddoes, a medical and chemical professional, saw fit to edit and overwrite participants’ accounts.
- 7.
Because of the objectivity, rationality, and professionalism it implies, it is no surprise that the one contributor who will make a similar grammatical choice in Davy’s Researches is, like Beddoes, a medical man: Dr. Blake (524).
- 8.
In addition to Chapter 2, see Fulford, “Conducting the Vital Fluid,” and Roe, “Atmospheric Air Itself.”
- 9.
By referring to Laputa, the flying island of Jonathan Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels, Harrington discredits the nitrous oxide trials in a manner similar to Polwhele: by reframing them in the literary domain.
- 10.
Although the commission, which included Antoine Lavoisier and Benjamin Franklin, was formed to examine French physician Charles d’Eslon’s use of Mesmer’s techniques, perceptions of Mesmer and animal magnetism were at stake. In Schaffer’s words, “It was hard to display mesmerists’ victims as deluded peasants. They included the Parisian elite … And it was hard to mark as outsiders well-known members of the medical profession” (352).
- 11.
Many physicians in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries exposed themselves to diseases. Among them were Isaac Cathrall, a London, Edinburgh, and Paris trained American physician whose Memoir on the Analysis of Black Vomit, Ejected in the Last Stage of the Yellow Fever (1800) details his self-experimentation with fluids from individuals known to have the disease. Having harvested black vomit from the stomach of a recently deceased individual, for example, in October 1794 he “applied some of it to my tongue and lips” (20), and years later shut himself in a room with the evaporated “effluvia of the vomit” (22). The German Johann Wilhelm Ritter (1776–1810) applied electricity to various parts of his body. In An Experimental Inquiry into the Properties of Opium, and its Effects on Living Subjects (1786), Edinburgh physician John Leigh describes how, among other things, he “threw a quantity of it [a warm opium solution] into my own urethra” (100). In 1813, French chemist Michel Bertrand demonstrated charcoal’s efficacy in preventing arsenic poisoning. Stuart Strickland’s important account of Ritter’s self-experimentation, “The Ideology of Self-Knowledge and the Practice of Self-Experimentation,” engages with the heroic discourse I trace here. “Ritter’s own electrical self-experimentation began innocently enough,” Strickland describes. But for Strickland, the comprehensive, dangerous, and painful nature of Ritter’s “heroic experiments” amounts to “a test of and a testament to Ritter’s personal courage” and “physical self-sacrifice” (457, 460).
- 12.
It is no coincidence that the quintessential and foundational mad scientist, Victor Frankenstein, was conceived by Mary Shelley during this era.
- 13.
Because the subversion of bodily well-being runs directly counter to their professional goals—that is, identifying and preserving norms of “health”—self-experimental doctors are more culturally ambiguous than others whose professions require them to risk their lives—e.g. soldiers, mine workers, etc.
- 14.
See Lennard J. Davis on the importance of quartiles in relation to norms.
- 15.
Having addressed Researches I–III, for example, the British Critic notes that the “fourth Research contains the account of various cases of persons, who, having respired the nitrous oxide, were affected with very singular symptoms. In the perusal of those cases, the reader may be either amused or astonished, according as he gives partial or entire credit to the narrations” (MDCCCI 537). Surgeon Robert Harrington noted Davy’s “imaginary flights and credulity” but speculates that Davy “must be influenced” by Beddoes and writes, “I must candidly acknowledge that he displays great ingenuity in his experiments; and if he was not under the dominion of the present absurd theory, and his genius properly applied, he might be an ornament to science” (as quoted by Golinski, Science 190–1).
- 16.
Lamb describes how scurvy seemed to confer on its sufferers a curious kind of benefit, provoking “a morbid receptivity to sense impressions, one aligned with the preternatural sensitivity scientists were trying to excite artificially”: “In the previous century scientists had attempted various prostheses for the sense-organs designed to make the work of discovery more exact.” As I aim to demonstrate throughout this book, scientific and literary authors in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries often were attuned to—and acknowledged—the benefits of pathologized non-normative embodiments.
- 17.
Mike Jay has similarly written that nitrous oxide demonstrated that an “altered sensory and mental frame had the power to generate an entirely different universe” (199).
- 18.
This is another point of contact between the nitrous oxide trials and recent disability theory. Nancy Mairs has written that, generally speaking, experiences of non-normative embodiment have the effect of collapsing the ontological gap that Golinski describes: “The body in trouble, becoming both a warier and a humbler creature, is more apt to experience herself all of a piece: a biochemical dynamo cranking out consciousness much as it generates platelets, feces, or reproductive cells…” (Mairs 42).
- 19.
He and Beddoes discussed nitrous oxide’s support of such a theory (Golinski, “Davy” 20). Also see Holmes, Age of Wonder, and Sharon Ruston.
- 20.
Mike Jay has specifically suggested that Coleridge’s relative silence about nitrous oxide (beyond what he shared with Davy for Researches) indicates his discomfort with the way that the gas gave rise to an unavoidable sense of the embodied mind (195–6). Yet at the time Coleridge often experimented with materialist physiological theories (see Neil Vickers).
- 21.
Davy’s other use of “former state of mind” to denote his sobriety is similar. In the other instance he inhales nitrous oxide because of “intense physical pain” from a mouth infection; his pain is diminished by the nitrous oxide until, “[a]s the former state of mind however returned, the state of organ returned with it” (464–5).
- 22.
The religious tone of the experience is more marked in the account Davy offers in his notebook: “I was now almost completely intoxicated… The sensations were superior to any I ever experienced. Inconceivably pleasurable … Theories passed rapidly thro the mind, believed I may say intensely, at the same time that every thing going on in the room was perceived. I seemed to be a sublime being, newly created and superior to other mortals, I was indignant at what they said of me and stalked majestically out of the laboratory to inform Dr Kinglake privately that nothing existed but thoughts” (as quoted in Holmes, Age 270). The religious tone of this passage resembles the religious tone of De Quincey’s first experience with opium and his “immortal druggist,” as described in Confessions of an English Opium-Eater (38–9).
- 23.
As elsewhere, I gesture here to Tobin Siebers’s definition of aesthetics: “Aesthetics tracks the sensations that some bodies feel in the presence of other bodies” (1).
- 24.
Two conflicting assessments of Davy neatly capture the tonal and syntactical contrast I foreground here. Peter B. Ford has vividly described how in Davy’s Researches, through the “interjection of subjectivity and the subject into the experiment,” “the objective recordings of a scientist … vanish” (249–50). Richard Holmes offers an opposing characterization of Davy’s “style” in Researches as “plain, discursive, and never sensational” as “[h]e presents himself throughout as the objective narrator of each experiment” (Age271). By flagging only one dimension of Davy’s style, Ford and Holmes omit the contrast that I argue is characteristic to the self-experimental style—in Davy’s text, but also in later works such as Thomas De Quincey’s Confessions of an English Opium-Eater and Robert Louis Stevenson’s Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde.
- 25.
Some emphasize the humor of the image. Richard Holmes, for example, notes that the print “played on the less romantic but equally popular notion of chemistry as ‘stinks,’ and the idea that laughing gas could produce a truly room-shaking fart” (Age 292). I read the humor of Gillray’s print as I read the humor of Polwhele’s “Pneumatic Revellers,” as secondary to the serious cultural critique it offers. Or, put otherwise, I understand Gillray and Polwhele as deploying humor to offset the danger posed by the nitrous oxide trials.
- 26.
For Edmund Burke, the natural sublime causes “astonishment” in the “soul, in which all its motions are suspended, with some degree of horror” and “the mind is so entirely filled with its object, that it cannot … reason on
that object which employs it” (47). For Immanuel Kant, the sublime causes “a mental agitation” (101), and for William Wordsworth, “whatever suspends the comparing power of the mind & possesses it with a feeling or image of intense unity, without a conscious contemplation of parts, has produced that state of the mind which is the consummation of the sublime” (Prose Works II: 353–4).
- 27.
In his (in many ways unreliable) introduction to the poem, Ernest Hartley Coleridge notes that “there are sound reasons for maintaining” that the “Conclusion” was written in autumn 1800 in part because it feels like an afterthought. As Jack Stillinger has detailed, the first extant copy of “Christabel” dates to the end of 1800 or to 1801 (Textual Instability 80).
References
———. Notice of Some Observations Made at the Medical Pneumatic Institution. Bristol: Biggs and Cottle, 1799.
Beddoes, Thomas, and James Watt. Considerations on the Medicinal Use of Factitious Airs, And on the Manner of Obtaining Them in Large Quantities. In Two Parts. Bristol: Bulgin and Rosser, 1794.
The British Critic, for January, February, March, April, May, and June. MDCCC. Vol. XV. London: Printed for F. and C. Rivington, 1800.
———. Researches, Chemical and Philosophical; Chiefly Concerning Nitrous Oxide, or Dephlogisticated Nitrous Air, and Its Respiration. London: Printed for J. Johnson by Biggs and Cottle, Bristol, 1800.
Leigh, John, M.D. An Experimental Inquiry Into the Properties of Opium, and Its Effects on Living Subjects: With Observations on Its History, Preparations and Uses. Edinburgh: Charles Elliot, 1786.
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Stanback, E.B. (2016). Pneumatic Self-Experimentation and the Aesthetics of Deviant Embodiment. In: The Wordsworth-Coleridge Circle and the Aesthetics of Disability. Palgrave Studies in Literature, Science and Medicine. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-137-51140-9_3
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