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Episode: Mike Jay – Free Radicals – How A Group of Romantic Experimenters Gave Birth to Psychedelic Science
Pub date: 2025-07-04

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I mean, you’ve got’a laugh, aintcha!

Nitrous Oxide made “a picaresque journey from laboratory to lecture hall, variety palace to dentist’s chair.” A substance that does not exist in nature, it fairly blew the minds of the radical scientific community in the late 18th Century when it was isolated and synthesised. Some of them couldn’t decide whether it was more remarkable medicinally or recreationally. What they did know was that it was a wonderful product of a modern scientific sensibility.

It is a story that takes in Joseph Priestley, Erasmus Darwin, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Robert Southey, Humphrey Davy, Peter Mark Roget (yes, that Roget), James Watt, and at its centre, the strangely undercelebrated Thomas Beddoes, who becomes the hero of Mike Jay’s delightful account. As the vanguard of modern anaesthesia this ‘laughing gas’ was one of the great boons to mankind, but such is the richness of material that it doesn’t really make much of an appearance until half way through the book. Before that we need to encounter a riot in Birmingham (“it was, like most riots in the 18th Century, unclear what the mob was rioting against”), a wild genius from Penzance, and a highly unorthodox pneumatic medical institute in Bristol. Tim was transported.

Mike Jay – Yale University Press – £11.99

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