Sign up to save your podcasts
Or
Share Humphry Davy
Share to email
Share to Facebook
Share to X
Share to email
Share to Facebook
Share to X
Or
Humphry Davy
In Bristol in 1799, a young man started to experiment with newly discovered gases, looking for a cure for tuberculosis. Humphry Davy, aged 20, nearly killed himself inhaling carbon monoxide. Nitrous oxide was next. It was highly pleasurable, ‘particularly in the chest and extremities’ and he began to dance around his laboratory ‘like a madman’, before passing out. By day, he gave the gas to patients, carefully noting their reactions. In the evenings, he invited his friends over to have a laugh (with assistants on standby to revive them with oxygen, as needed).
The Romantic poets, Robert Southey and Samuel Taylor Coleridge could barely contain their excitement.
During one session, Davy noted that the gas numbed his toothache and suggested that it could perhaps be used during surgical operations. But it was another fifty years before nitrous oxide was used by doctors. Throughout the 20th century, it was widely used during dentistry and to numb the pain of childbirth. (Nitrous oxide is the gas in ‘gas and air’: the ‘air’ is oxygen) .And it still is today, but less so. (It’s a potent greenhouse gas that damages the ozone layer, it’s difficult to store and there are side-effects). But, just as medical use is diminishing, recreational use is on the rise.
A new generation of pleasure seekers have started experimenting, just as Davy did, despite the associated risks of injuries caused by fainting and death by suffocation.
Naomi Alderman tells how a gas that created ‘ecstatic lunatics’ came to be used as an anaesthetic, with help from biographer, Richard Holmes and anaesthetist, Kevin Fong.
Picture: Humphry Davy and Anaesthesia, Credit: Science Photo Library
View all episodes
By BBC World Service
4.4
939939 ratings
In Bristol in 1799, a young man started to experiment with newly discovered gases, looking for a cure for tuberculosis. Humphry Davy, aged 20, nearly killed himself inhaling carbon monoxide. Nitrous oxide was next. It was highly pleasurable, ‘particularly in the chest and extremities’ and he began to dance around his laboratory ‘like a madman’, before passing out. By day, he gave the gas to patients, carefully noting their reactions. In the evenings, he invited his friends over to have a laugh (with assistants on standby to revive them with oxygen, as needed).
The Romantic poets, Robert Southey and Samuel Taylor Coleridge could barely contain their excitement.
During one session, Davy noted that the gas numbed his toothache and suggested that it could perhaps be used during surgical operations. But it was another fifty years before nitrous oxide was used by doctors. Throughout the 20th century, it was widely used during dentistry and to numb the pain of childbirth. (Nitrous oxide is the gas in ‘gas and air’: the ‘air’ is oxygen) .And it still is today, but less so. (It’s a potent greenhouse gas that damages the ozone layer, it’s difficult to store and there are side-effects). But, just as medical use is diminishing, recreational use is on the rise.
A new generation of pleasure seekers have started experimenting, just as Davy did, despite the associated risks of injuries caused by fainting and death by suffocation.
Naomi Alderman tells how a gas that created ‘ecstatic lunatics’ came to be used as an anaesthetic, with help from biographer, Richard Holmes and anaesthetist, Kevin Fong.
Picture: Humphry Davy and Anaesthesia, Credit: Science Photo Library
More shows like Discovery
View all
Global News Podcast
7,766 Listeners
More or Less
891 Listeners
Newshour
1,066 Listeners
In Our Time
5,474 Listeners
The Documentary Podcast
1,823 Listeners
6 Minute English
1,799 Listeners
Learning English Conversations
1,050 Listeners
The Infinite Monkey Cage
2,071 Listeners
The Naked Scientists Podcast
609 Listeners
Nature Podcast
765 Listeners
Health Check
89 Listeners
BBC Inside Science
404 Listeners
Science Weekly
428 Listeners
Science Magazine Podcast
825 Listeners
The Inquiry
736 Listeners
The Life Scientific
229 Listeners
Science In Action
333 Listeners
Unexpected Elements
360 Listeners
CrowdScience
479 Listeners
People Fixing the World
243 Listeners
You're Dead to Me
3,224 Listeners
Americast
746 Listeners
The world, the universe and us
115 Listeners
The Bomb
1,045 Listeners