The Age of Wonder

by Richard Holmes

  Davy had nearly recovered his strength by the next evening, that is some thirty hours later. He concluded calmly that if he had taken ‘four or five [quart] inspirations instead of three’, he would have ‘destroyed life immediately without producing any painful sensations’. A week later he was trying to inhale ‘carbonic acid’ (perhaps vaporised phenol), which so burnt his epiglottis that he choked.48

  It is remarkable that these effects did not frighten or deter him, and these early experiments give a first glimpse of the reckless courage and impetuosity that always drove Davy in the laboratory. Nonetheless, it is also notable that he had previously prepared a bladder of oxygen in case of emergency, and Dwyer was instructed to apply it. The publisher Joseph Cottle, who was convinced of Davy’s genius and hoped eventually to print the results of his experiments (in the unlikely event that he survived them), recalled melodramatically: ‘No personal danger restrained him from determining facts, as the data for his reasoning … He seemed to act as if in case of sacrificing one life, he had two or three others in reserve, on which he could fall back in case of necessity … Occasionally I half despaired of seeing him alive the next morning.’49

  Finally Davy decided that the properties of nitrous oxide (N2O, or laughing gas) made it the safest and the most promising for trials. He set himself his first experimental research programme, to test different concentrations of the gas: first on himself, then on animals, and finally on other human volunteers. Initially he was especially interested to analyse the exhaled air of the lungs, to discover what quantities of the gas were absorbed into the human bloodstream. He devised ingenious equipment to measure and control both inhalations and exhalations: various silk bags and bladders, glass vacuum flasks, a mercurial ‘air-holder and breathing machine’ of cast iron, made by his assistant Clayfield, wooden and metal mouthpieces, corked tubes which could be placed in the nostrils, face-masks and hand pumps, and finally (after nine months) a complete portable gas chamber with entrance and exit valves.50

  At first Davy was largely concerned with the process of respiration, and possible therapeutic benefits. Later, with his human subjects, he became more interested in the physiological reactions of the whole body; and effects of pleasure and pain. Finally he became fascinated by purely psychological responses. He wrote proudly to his mother in Penzance: ‘We are going on gloriously. Our palsied patients are getting better; and, to be a little conceited, I am making discoveries every day.’51 He also boasted that he had been invited to contribute poetry to the leading Bristol literary magazine the Annual Anthology. It was published by Cottle, and edited by the young poet and one-time Pantisocrat Robert Southey, recently returned from Spain.

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  Nitrous oxide was not without risks. It was considered a lethal gas by both Priestley and the American chemist Dr Samuel Mitchill.52 But Davy went ahead anyway. He heated crystals of ammonium nitrate, collected the gas released in a green oiled-silk bag, passed it through water vapour to remove impurities, then inhaled it through a mouthpiece while his assistant Dr Kinglake monitored his pulse rate.53 The immediate obvious danger was that the ammonium nitrate would explode at a temperature above 400 degrees; the other was that the first inhalations would kill him or permanently damage the linings of his lungs.

  But Davy’s first experiment went superbly. After inhaling four quarts of gas, he experienced ‘highly pleasurable thrilling, particularly in the chest and extremities. The objects around me became dazzling, and my hearing more acute.’ The next day the entire experience appeared dreamlike, he could not recall his sensations, and only by rereading his laboratory notes was he convinced that the experiment had taken place at all.54

  Davy frankly admitted the extraordinary first effects of nitrous oxide. He experienced strange ‘thrillings’, increased bodily heat in his extremities, giddiness, raised pulse rate and (carefully observed in a mirror) a facial flush or suffusion of blood so ‘my cheeks became purple’. He noted: ‘Sometimes I manifested my pleasure by stamping or laughing only; at other times, by dancing round the room and vociferating.55 He sent his first account to his Cornish supporter Davies Giddy in a letter of 10 April 1799. ‘This gas raised my pulse upwards of twenty strokes, made me dance about the laboratory as a madman, and has kept my spirits in a glow ever since.’56 Shortly afterwards he sent three rather more sober reports to the leading scientific magazine of the day, Nicholson’s Journal. These earliest experiments he also recorded in verse, partly to see how far his linguistic skills were affected, and also to explore whether the experience could be imaginatively described. In this case the poetry was itself a form of scientific data. The result was very bad verse, but surprisingly precise physiological information. He headed it ‘On Breathing Nitrous Oxide’.

  Not in the ideal dreams of wild desire

  Have I beheld a rapture-waking form;

  My bosom burns with no unhallowed fire:

  Yet is my cheek with rosy blushes warm

  Yet are my eyes with sparkling lustre filled

  Yet is my mouth replete with murmuring sound

  Yet are my limbs with inward transport thrilled

  And clad with newborn mightiness around.57

  Davy suggests in the opening three lines that his physiological state could be compared to that of spontaneous sexual arousal produced by an erotic dream (‘dreams of wild desire … a rapture-waking form’). Yet in fact this is not the cause (although Anna Beddoes may have provoked the comparison). He then goes on in the next four lines carefully to define his physical sensations, the facial blushing and so on, and ends with the overwhelming delusion of physical power (‘newborn mightiness’). Davy’s verse is normally very clear, so the uncharacteristic confusion of grammar and syntax here, opening with the emphatic but barely coherent ‘Not’, and tailing off into the repeated ‘Yet’, is itself interesting empirical evidence of his mental state.

  His discovery of the gas’s potential filled him with excitement and ambition. One of his earliest laboratory notes records: ‘This evening April 27th [1799] I have felt a more high degree of pleasure from breathing nitrous oxide than I ever felt from any cause whatever — a thrilling all over me most exquisitely pleasurable, I said to myself I was born to benefit the world by my great talents.’58

  Nitrous oxide inhalations now became a regular part of his laboratory routine. He recorded in his notes: ‘Between April and June I constantly breathed the gas sometimes three or four times a day for a week, at other times, four or five times a week only. The general effect of it I can describe with great difficulty, nor can I well discriminate between its agency and that of other physical and moral causes. I slept less than usual, I thought more in bed, I had a constant desire of action.’ He did not define what this ‘action’ might be, but he thought he had ‘increased sensibility of touch’, and the tips of his fingers were ‘pained’ by rough things, even by paper.59 He felt he was ‘more irritable than usual’, though that might have had other ‘moral’ causes. In retrospect it appears that these ‘moral causes’ might have been connected with Anna Beddoes.60

  Normally the gas was taken in laboratory conditions, with Dr Kinglake as his assistant, while rigorous notes were taken. But sometimes Davy returned in the evenings, apparently alone. These sessions seem to have been particularly intense. ‘I have often felt very great pleasure when breathing it alone, in darkness and silence, occupied only by ideal existence.’61 On the evening of 5 May 1799 Davy prepared to subject himself to a special session, to see what the psychological effects might be of a deliberately excessive dose. He prepared for this by going for a long, solitary, moonlit walk along the banks of the Avon, clearing his mind and tuning his feelings to the beauties of nature. After eating a supper, drinking two glasses of brandy and water and sitting for some time on the top of the wall reading Condorcet’s Life of Voltaire, he returned to Dowry Square, and immediately inhaled six quarts of pure nitrous oxide. The experiment was monitored by Kinglake. The results were striking, but oddly disappointi
ng, because they produced no further mental or spiritual revelations: ‘The pleasurable sensation was at first local, and perceived in the lips and the cheeks. It gradually, however, diffused itself over the whole body, and in the middle of the experiment was for a moment so intense and pure as to absorb existence. At this moment, and not before, I lost consciousness; it was, however, quickly restored, and I endeavoured to make a bystander acquainted with the pleasures I experienced by laughing and stamping. I had no vivid ideas.’62

  There was no extension of his earlier visionary glimpses to record in his notes. Though he had ‘vivid and agreeable dreams’ later that night, nothing further emerged from his unconscious mind. The large dose of nitrous oxide brought him no spiritual revelation, no deeper contact with ‘the universe’. Perhaps it was Davy’s disappointment with this that made him overlook at first the significant physiological fact that the gas could be used in an entirely different way: to banish consciousness altogether, and then safely and quickly ‘restore’ it. A gas that could blot out feelings – ana-thesia – and then bring them back.

  Yet in retrospect Davy clearly grasped what had occurred, as he returned to this experience some twenty years later in his book Salmonia. While discussing the nature of pain as felt by animals and even fish, and the sense of impending death, he recalled the process of ‘losing consciousness’ by inhaling both nitrous oxide and (the lethal) carbon monoxide gas.63

  He continued experimenting on himself until July, usually three or four times daily, and sometimes in the evening after drinking wine or brandy. Yet he remained meticulous in all his scientific records. For example, he repeatedly measured his lung capacity, finally refining his figures down to these: 254 cubic inches when he forcefully inhaled; 135 cubic inches when he naturally inhaled; and, perhaps most interesting, forty cubic inches of residual air. He also analysed the lung content of natural air without nitrous oxide: 71.9 per cent nitrogen, 15.2 per cent oxygen, and 12.8 per cent carbon dioxide, which is startlingly close to a modern chemical analysis.64

  In May 1799 he tentatively began nitrous oxide trials with the clinic’s regular patients. The results could be unpredictable. Some reported delicious sensations of bodily heat and stimulation. Others recorded alarming muscular spasms or mental confusion. Yet others were merely made dizzy or sleepy.

  Davy now pioneered the ‘blind’ experimental method. He deliberately did not tell his subjects what concentration of nitrous oxide they were breathing, or whether they were in fact inhaling ordinary air (which they sometimes were). He carefully recorded pulse, muscular reactions, visual distortions, blushing and sexual stimulation, and any episodes of mental confusion or hysteria. He also asked his subjects to describe in detail their own subjective sensations.

  His laboratory journals show that he was increasingly fascinated by the hallucinogenic properties of the gas, and its effects on human consciousness and perceptions. Slowly he became aware of its power to alter moods, stimulate the body’s energy and deaden pain. Then he hovered again around the revolutionary notion of anaesthesia, and one further decisive step: the idea that controlled doses of nitrous oxide might be used in a surgical context.65

  Davy initially used voluntary patients who were already attending the clinic, or members of Beddoes’s immediate circle of family and friends. Most were male, but there were several young women, though they remain tactfully unnamed in his reports. Anna Beddoes certainly inhaled the gas under Davy’s supervision, perhaps for pleasure as much as in the interests of science. As Beddoes himself wryly observed: ‘Mrs. Beddoes had frequently seemed to be ascending like a balloon up the hill to Clifton.’ Robert Southey’s young wife Edith also inhaled, though Davy’s note records that she was ‘very little affected, only rendered giddy’.66

  But one young woman, described only as ‘Miss J’, had such a violent reaction that Davy was evidently alarmed. ‘Miss J breathed this morning six quarts … in about a minute she suffered the bag to drop. She then began to sob most violently, then cried and laughed alternately. She used most vivid muscular actions and appeared to be perfectly delirious in about ten minutes.’ Davy dragged her over to the window, and attempted to calm her by getting her to take deep breaths of fresh air. ‘She relapsed again and continued in the hysterical fit for near two minutes. Her muscular motions were uncommonly violent.’67

  Joseph Cottle recorded a rumour that another young woman was overcome by hysterical excitement, ran out of the laboratory, and rushed screaming down the street towards the Avon, where she was somewhat bizarrely reported to have ‘jumped over a large dog’ before she could be restrained and brought back. This case does not appear in Davy’s notes, but the idea that women could be made to lose their inhibitions, and might even be sexually aroused by nitrous oxide, persisted.

  With his experimental subjects, Davy monitored pulse rates, and required them to undergo certain standard tests, such as gazing at a candle flame and listening to bells. He wanted to record physiological changes, such as distortions of vision and hearing. But gradually he became more and more interested in subjective responses. He asked his Institution patients to put into words exactly what they were feeling. This proved surprisingly difficult, and early responses ranged from ‘I don’t know how, but very queer’; to ‘I felt like the sound of a harp.’68

  Davy now conceived a new and original line of investigation. He began to enlist perfectly healthy subjects, chosen from his highly articulate circle of Bristol friends, and asked them to describe their sensations as precisely as possible. They included the poet Robert Southey, several members of the Edgeworth family, Gregory Watt and his father James, Tom Wedgwood, the heir to the great Staffordshire pottery company, and a number of young writers and scholars like Peter Roget and John Rickman.

  A few, like Cottle, refused to volunteer, either on moral or prudential grounds. But it is striking how many accepted. Eighty pages of these accounts were eventually published in Davy’s Researches. Many of their strange, gasped phrases included the idea of rebirth: ‘I seemed a new being’; ‘I seemed a sublime being newly created’; ‘I felt as if possessed of new organs.’69 Initial enthusiasm was naïve and unbounded. Gregory Watt spoke of ‘heavenly inhalations’. Robert Southey wrote to his brother: ‘O, Tom! Such a gas has Davy discovered, the gaseous oxide. Oh, Tom! I have had some; it made me laugh and tingle in every toe and finger-tip. Davy has actually invented a new pleasure, for which language has no name. Oh, Tom! I am going for more this evening! It makes one strong and happy! So gloriously happy!’70

  Maria Edgeworth visited Clifton at this euphoric time, and gave a novelistic spin to her sister Anna’s glowing accounts of Davy’s experiments. The handsome young Cornishman ‘enthusiastically expects wonders will be performed by the use of certain gases, which inebriate in the most delightful manner, having the oblivious effects of Lethe, and at the same time giving the rapturous sensations of the Nectar of the Gods!’ Maria also noted with an amused eye that Anna seemed particularly full of ‘grace, genius, vivacity, and kindness’ that spring, implying that this had not always been the case before Mr Davy’s arrival.71

  But some accounts were more prosaic. Southey and several others recorded the simple terror they felt on first putting the wooden mouthpiece between their lips, and attempting to breathe the gas. This was followed by sensations of relief, giddiness or weightlessness, falling over, and finally helpless laughter: ‘The laughter was involuntary but highly pleasurable, accompanied by a thrill all through me.’ It is noticeable that Southey’s accounts (given both to Beddoes and to Davy in the laboratory) are much more restrained than those in his private letters to his brother Tom. This marks an interesting problem in the gathering of supposedly objective, scientific evidence.

  Dr Peter Mark Roget, then a young medical student from Edinburgh, and the future compiler of Roget’s Thesaurus (1852), found, ironically enough, great difficulty in choosing the words to describe his feelings aptly. ‘I felt myself totally incapable of speaking … My ideas s
ucceeded one another with extreme rapidity, thoughts rushed like a torrent through my mind.’ He felt forced to try analogies, and towards the end managed an accurate description of fainting: ‘I suddenly lost sight of all the objects round me, they being apparently obscured by clouds, in which were many luminous points, similar to what is experienced on rising suddenly and stretching out the arms.’72

  Mr Coates primly observed ‘a degree of hilarity altogether new to me’; while Miss Rylands was circumspectly ‘deprived of the power of speaking, but not of recollection’. Beddoes’s brother-in-law, the jolly Mr Lovell Edgeworth, ‘burst into a violent fit of laughter, and capered about the room without having the power of restraining myself’. He remarked wonderingly that he almost bit through the wooden mouthpiece.

  What Davy began to see was that reactions reflected personal temperament, as much as simple physiological changes. So what the musician Mr Wansey reported was an experience like ‘some of the grand choruses of the Messiah’ which he had heard played by 700 instruments in Westminster Abbey five years previously. While Southey’s great friend, the down-to-earth radical tanner of Nether Stowey, Tom Poole, was reminded of climbing mountains in Glamorganshire.73

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  The friendship which now formed between Southey and Davy was one of the most important of his Bristol years. They spent many evenings together at Dowry Square in the spring of 1799, discussing politics, science, literature and medicine, as well as inhaling nitrous oxide. They sometimes walked out together to Tom Poole’s house in Nether Stowey, or to Southey’s lodgings in Wiltshire. ‘When I went to the Pneumatic Institute,’ Southey recalled, ‘he had to tell me of some new experiment or discovery and the views which it opened for him, and when he came to Westbury there was a fresh bit of Madoc for his hearing.’74 Southey was hugely impressed by Davy’s energy and idealism. He wrote to his friend William Wynn: ‘Humphry Davy possesses the most miraculous talents I ever met with or heard of, and will I think do more for medicine than any person who has ever gone before him.’75