Scientific progress is often thought of as a string of breakthrough ideas and elegantly designed experiments. In The Atmosphere of Heaven, scientific progress occurs almost as an aside during the chaos of intoxication.
Mike Jay tells the story of Thomas Beddoes, 1760 – 1808, who was a maverick doctor at the Pneumatic Institution in Bristol, England – now regarded as the first example of a medical research institution, and considered to be a crucial influence on the modern drug culture, the birth of the Romantic Movement and the development of anesthetic surgery.
Beddoes surrounded himself with a brilliant circle of alternative thinkers, including Charles Darwin’s grandfather Erasmus Darwin, the poet Samuel Taylor Coleridge and two devoted protégées: Davies Giddy and Humphry Davy, who both later became presidents of the Royal Society.
The book tells the farcical tales of the discovery nitrous oxide and its mind-altering properties. As the researchers discovered, nitrous oxide – which is also called laughing gas – causes uncontrollable laughing, numbs all physical pain and serves as a gateway to, well, unconsciousness.
The riotous scenes during intoxication are hilarious, yet it’s tantalising – almost to the point of frustration – that they observe its pain-numbing abilities yet fail to realise its full potential as a surgical anesthetic, thus postponing an inevitable medical revolution.
It is Giddy that written history gives the first credit, as he said in 1975 to Beddoes, “Might it not be used before painful operations?” For decades the idea was bandied about, it seems, but nothing came of it until 1844, when Horace Wells, a dentist on the other side of the world – Connecticut, USA – experimented on himself with nitrous oxide and successfully extracted a wisdom tooth. By the 1960s, there were a great number of American dentists using nitrous oxide, prompting a British dentist to first try it for the first time in 1864.
The research behind this book is outstanding, and Jay breathes life into the characters and perspectives of the time. From the conversations Beddoes overheard, of strangers calling him “short and fat” and “perfectly stupid”, to the descriptions of the temporary mania that would engulf those who tried the gas, this farcical tale is told in exquisite detail.
