The Age of Wonder

by Richard Holmes

  By 1809 Davy’s reputation was powerfully in the ascendant. He was included in Volume 7 of the influential series Public Characters: Biographical Memoirs of Distinguished Subjects. The long entry praised his modesty and genius, described his ‘galvanic experiments’ at the Royal Institution, and gave a long summary of the Bakerian Lectures. He was presented as an exemplary figure from the new world of British science, a dedicated researcher ‘bent over his retorts’, unworldly and ignoring public fame. There was no hint of his future reputation for arrogance, ambition and professional jealousies.183

  A huge composite portrait, Eminent Men of Science Living in 1807–8, was painted to commemorate the historic expansion in British science at this moment. In fact it represents a retrospective view, as the artist William Walker actually painted it around 1820. In it he depicted a group of thirty figures, all male, standing and sitting with grave formality in some ideal clubland smoking room. They include in the front ranks Davy, Herschel, Banks, Dalton, Cavendish and Jenner. Dr Thomas Beddoes is nowhere to be found. He had been forgotten, just as he feared.♣

  The poet Anna Barbauld, who had previously written about Joseph Priestley’s epoch-making experiments, now singled out Davy’s scientific lectures as one of the glories of the age. Future historians would

  Point where mute crowds on Davy’s lips reposed,

  And Nature’s coyest secrets were disclosed.184

  Her faintly mischievous image did not overlook the sexual frisson surrounding Davy’s popular performances, and naturally this aroused some jealousy. Some of Davy’s oldest friends worried about the effect on him of success and celebrity. Coleridge feared he was sacrificing himself to London fashion, ‘more and more determined to mould himself upon the age, in order to make the age mould itself upon him’.185 But perhaps this was the inevitable cost of such success.

  One consequence of Davy’s celebrity was tempting offers to give public lectures outside London. In 1810 he accepted an invitation to Ireland to give his Chemical and Geological lectures for an exceptional fee of a thousand guineas. He lectured to packed theatres in Dublin in spring 1810, and again in spring 1811, when Trinity College conferred on him an honorary doctorate. In these lectures he particularly stressed the importance of scientific knowledge for women’s education, and for ‘the improvement of the female mind’. Milton was wrong on the subject, and Mary Wollstonecraft was right.186 Among his attentive and admiring audiences was a strikingly pretty and vivacious Scottish widow called Jane Apreece. At a glittering reception afterwards, Jane Apreece told Humphry Davy that she loved fishing.

  ♣ These days there are several large, white Davy tombstones leant against the south-east corner of the church, shrouded in nettles and deadly nightshade. They commemorate in deeply-cut but blurred lettering earlier members of the family, dating from the seventeenth or even sixteenth century. Plain and monolithic, one reads simply: ‘Sac. Mem. D. Davy et G. Davy’, without dates. The Ludgvan parish register records a Davy in 1588. The churchyard looks out over a tiny pub, a wood, and then a wild, bleak landscape of gorse and stones and broken fields, tumbling down to the sea. It reminds one that the Cornish sculptor Barbara Hepworth used to speak of ‘the pagan triangle of landscape’ between St Ives, St Just and Penzance (Hepworth Museum, St Ives).

  ♣ Borlase’s chemist shop, now known as the Peasgood Pharmacy, still exists on the same site at the top of Penzance. The old ‘Instructions for Apprentices’ still hang framed in its back dispensary, indicating working hours from 7 a.m. to 8 p.m., when ‘shutters are put up’. Discipline was strict — ‘all joking and trifling are forbidden during hours of business in the shop’ — and minute: ‘In order to avoid using the mouth to moisten labels it is requisite that the gum brush or label-damper be always used. Biting of corks, licking of labels, licking of fingers or thumb for the purpose of taking up paper, are all prohibited as unclean and unbecoming … It is extremely important that all counters are kept free from muddles …’ Davy was to remember these instructions when he tried to impose order on the Royal Institution assistants twenty years later.

  ♣ Priestley gave a vivid account of an experiment in 1775, in which a mouse struggled for life in his air pump for over half an hour, thus proving that de-phlogistated air (oxygen) was a supporter of animal respiration. See Jenny Uglow, The Lunar Men (2002). Perhaps it also proved something else, as deduced by Anna Barbauld. She wrote about this experiment from the mouse’s point of view, in a touching poem in which the ‘freeborn mouse’, cruelly imprisoned in its laboratory cage, appeals for its right to life, perhaps the first animal-rights manifesto ever written.

  ♣ Lavoisier’s 1789 Preface makes one wonder when people really did first begin to look at objects in nature carefully, for their own sake. The idea of exquisite, close observation of natural phenomena has its own literary history. Robert Hooke’s Micrographia of 1664, with its exquisite drawings of fleas and other tiny creatures, championed the idea of minute observation at scales smaller than normal human vision. But the precise, even reverent contemplation of nature is clearly associated with the Romantics, and can be seen arriving in private journals and letters from the 1760s onwards. The journals of Joseph Banks and his colleagues in the South Seas, of Gilbert White in Hampshire, of Coleridge in Somerset, of Dorothy Wordsworth in the Lake District, all demonstrate this (almost sacred) attention to things simply and precisely observed. William Herschel wrote a brilliant paper on the nature of objective observation, and its particular problems in astronomy. Goethe wrote another in 1798 on the general problems of subjectivity, ‘Empirical Observation and Science’. In 1788 Edward Jenner published a chilling paper in the Royal Society’s Philosophical Transactions on observing the murderous activity of a baby cuckoo in a sparrow’s nest. Jenner’s quiet, meticulous description of the baby cuckoo (while still blind) relentlessly wheelbarrowing its smaller ‘rival’ sparrow chick backwards, between its half-formed wings, up the side of the nest until it was thrown out, has all the power of a moral allegory, but remains completely objective in tone. ‘Observations on the Natural History of the Cuckoo, in a Letter to John Hunter FRA’ (1788). See Tim Fulford (ed.), Romanticism and Science (2002), vol 4.

  ♣ In 1795 Pitt had levied a tax on hair powder, to help raise funds for military campaigns abroad. The ribbon fell out of Beddoes’s letter as I unfolded it in the Truro archive, and I let out a republican whoop! that almost led to my ejection.

  ♣ The present square is subdued and beautiful, if distinctly run-down. No. 7 has no plaque behind its wisteria, and No. 6 has become the offices of a builders’ merchant. Nevertheless the distant memory of its great, subversive medical tradition still haunts the square: one worn old stone plate reads: ‘Robert Young, Surgeon’, while another ancient brass proclaims ‘Clifton Dispensary’.

  ♣ These confessional poems include ‘Written After Recovery from a Dangerous Illness’ (1808, Memoirs, pp.114-16); ‘The Massy Pillars of the Earth’ (1812, Memoirs, p.234); ‘The Fireflies’ (1819, Memoirs, pp.251-4); ‘The Eagles’(1821, Memoirs, p.279 and Salmonia, pp.98-100); ‘On the Death of Lord Byron’ (1824, Memoirs, p.285); ‘Ulswater’ (1825, Memoirs, pp.320-2); ‘Thoughts’ (1827, Memoirs, p.334); ‘The Waterfall of the Traun’ (1827, Memoirs, p.360). They will all appear later in this narrative.

  ♣ To this day there is still much controversy in the medical literature about Davy’s and Beddoes’s failure to pursue anaesthesia at this time, a debate hosted by the Association of the History of Anaesthesia. Several scholars suggest a ‘cultural’ as much as a technical inhibition. They argue that the late-eighteenth-century attitude to pain, in a surgical context, did not admit to the concept of a ‘pain-free’ operation. Pain itself was a natural and intrinsic part of the surgical procedure, and a surgeon’s ability to handle a patient’s pain – through his imposed psychological authority, his dexterity, and above all his sheer speed of amputation and extraction — was an essential part of his profession. In a word, there was the need for a ‘a paradigm shift
’ to conceive of pain-free surgery. See Stephanie J. Snow, Operations without Pain (2005), Dr A.K.Adam, ‘The Long Delay: Davy to Morton’, in the Journal of the Royal Society of Medicine, vol 89, February 1996. For a masterly overview of surgical pain and procedure in the early nineteenth century, see Druin Burch, Digging Up the Dead (2007). The whole question will be pursued in my Chapter 7, ‘Dr Frankenstein and the Soul’.

  ♣ Davy had tried various versions of this prudential sentence in his notebooks, and it had evidently given him some trouble. He had, for example, first written not ‘sources of power’, but ‘germs of power in civilized life’, a much more tentative idea. Also, the uncharacteristic word ‘soul’ had originally been the more exuberant ‘spirit of life’. Most striking of all, he had finally deleted from the text of his Discourse any ideal of a cooperative society, in which the wealthy had a duty to fund research, an essential aspect of Beddoes’s vision. In his manuscript he had originally written: ‘What might we not hope for in a state of society in which the character of the philosopher [scientist] was united with that of the artist, and in which it became the business of men of property and power eminently to patronise the sciences?’ (Davy Archive, Royal Institution, Ms Box 13 (c), pp.57-8.)

  ♣ The temporary laboratory assistant in 1807 was Davy’s young cousin Edmund Davy. The following year the post was handed over to his brother John, then eighteen, who remained until 1811. The tense, excited, youthful atmosphere of the laboratory was crucial at this stage in Davy’s work. It would be recreated with the young Michael Faraday eight years later. The explosive appeal of potassium and sodium to young chemists is wonderfully caught in Oliver Sacks’s autobiography, Uncle Tungsten: Memories of a Chemical Boyhood. Sacks and two teenage friends first watch as ‘a frenzied molten blob’ of potassium threatens to set light to his bedroom laboratory, and then go out to throw a three-pound lump of sodium in Highgate Ponds. ‘It took fire instantly and sped around and around the surface like a demented meteor, with a huge sheet of yellow flame above it. We all exulted — this was chemistry with a vengeance!’ Oliver Sacks, Uncle Tungsten (2001), pp.122-3.

  ♣ Beddoes was recovered in the fine biography by Dorothy Stansfield (1984), and through the work of the late, lamented Roy Porter in a number of brilliant essays, notably ‘Thomas Beddoes and Biography’ in Telling Lives in Science, ed. Michael Shortland and Richard Yeo (1996), and finally in Porter’s masterwork on the history of medicine, The Greatest Benefit to Mankind (2001).

  7

  Dr Frankenstein and the Soul

  1

  In September 1811 the Herschels’ old friend Fanny Burney, by then the married Madame d’Arblay, underwent an agonising operation for breast cancer without anaesthetic. It was carried out by an outstanding French military surgeon, Dominique Larrey, in Paris, and so successfully concluded that she lived for another twenty years. What is even more remarkable, Fanny Burney remained conscious throughout the entire operation, and subsequently wrote a detailed account of this experience, watching parts of the surgical procedure through the thin cambric cloth that had been placed over her face. At the time the surgeon did not realise that the material was semi-transparent. ‘I refused to be held; but when, bright through the cambric, I saw the glitter of polished steel — I closed my eyes. I would not trust to convulsive fear the sight of the terrible incision.’

  On the subject of pain, and Humphry Davy’s failure to pursue anaesthesia, it is worth considering what Fanny Burney wrote about her terror before this mastectomy operation: ‘All hope of escaping this evil being now at an end, I could only console or employ my mind in considering how to render it less dreadful to [my husband] M. d’Arblay. M. Dubois had pronounced: “you must expect to suffer — I do not wish to mislead you — you will suffer — you will suffer very much!” M. Ribe had charged me to cry! To withhold or restrain myself might have seriously bad consequences, he said. M. Moreau, in echoing this injunction, enquired whether I had cried or screamed at the birth of Alexandre. Alas, I told him, it had not been possible to do otherwise. “Oh then,” he answered, “there is no fear!” — What terrible inferences were here to be drawn!’1

  Indeed, she screamed throughout the operation. ‘When the dreadful steel was plunged into the breast — cutting through veins — arteries — flesh – nerves — I needed no injunction not to restrain my cries. I began a scream that lasted unintermittingly during the whole time of the incision — & I almost marvel that it rings not in my ears still! So excruciating was the agony … All description would be baffled … I felt the Knife rackling against the breast bone — scraping it!’

  One of Burney’s many extraordinary reflections was whether extreme physical pain could not only induce unconsciousness — ‘I have two total chasms in my memory of this transaction’ — but actually force the soul out of the body. She also found that the act of recollection carried its own pain, and that she had taken three months to complete the account, as a letter of nearly 10,000 words to her sister Esther. She had severe headaches every time she tried to go on with it. Once finished, she could not look back over what she had written. ‘I dare not revise, nor read, the recollection is still so painful.’ It is an astonishing record of courage, not least in Fanny’s determination to protect her husband from the trauma of the operation. But it also recalls what the real conditions of surgery were at this period.

  Throughout the Napoleonic Wars, medical science had been spurred on by the immediate bloody demands of the battlefield. It became ever more daring and more ruthless. Larrey, for example, had performed 200 amputations in twenty-four hours after the battle of Borodino, and been awarded the Légion d’Honneur.2 But as the conflict wound down, it began to turn again to more speculative enquiries. France was still held to lead Europe in medicine and surgery, and its great state hospitals in Paris, notably the Hôtel Dieu and La Salpêtrière on the Left Bank, still pioneered surgical techniques and anatomical theory. Here Xavier Bichat and Baron Cuvier reigned supreme. Nevertheless, the collapse of the French wartime economy, and the overwhelming demands made on the country’s medical resources by returning veterans and mutilés de guerre, began to hinder its scientific advances.

  By contrast, the teaching hospitals of London and Edinburgh were now gaining an international reputation. Ever-vigilant, Joseph Banks was anxious to foster this growing advantage and prestige through elections to the Royal Society. Medicine was fashionable, and the hospitals began to attract a new and gifted generation of medical students and teachers, such as Henry Cline (St Thomas’s), John Abernethy (St Bartholomew’s), Joseph Henry Green (Guy’s) and Astley Cooper (Guy’s).

  Banks drew them into the Royal Society wherever possible. For example, he ensured that Astley Cooper’s pioneering operation of piercing the human membrane tympani (eardrum) to relieve potentially fatal inner-ear infection reached a wide audience by being written up for the Society’s Philosophical Transactions in 1801.3 Thanks to Banks, Cooper was elected to the Royal Society and awarded the famous Copley Medal for this work, at the age of thirty-three. Cooper’s students would include John Keats at Guy’s Hospital in 1814. Other medical men made important contacts in the literary world. The radically minded Henry Cline befriended the writers Horne Tooke and John Thelwall, and even acted as a character witness during their trial for treason in 1794. John Abernethy treated Coleridge for opium addiction, and J.H. Green would become Coleridge’s amanuensis in 1818. In 1816 Byron chose as his travelling companion in exile the young Dr William Polidori, newly qualified at Edinburgh Hospital. Polidori secretly contracted with the publisher Murray to keep a diary of Milord’s exploits (perhaps not quite in accordance with his Hippocratic oath).

  Banks kept his all-seeing eye on all these too. Among them, he soon became aware of a talented and unorthodox young surgeon, William Lawrence, working at St Bartholomew’s Hospital under John Abernethy. As early as 1802, when Lawrence was a mere medical student aged only nineteen, Banks had spotted him and recommended him to William Clift, the conse
rvator of the Hunterian Collection. ‘Sir, I beg leave to introduce to your acquaintance the bearer Mr William Lawrence, a Comparative Anatomist who is able to give — as well as receive — information. He wishes to see the [skeletons of the] Elephant & the Rhinoceros, & will probably find in the Collection many more things that he will desire to look at.’4 It was Lawrence who would rekindle one of the most disturbing scientific debates of the Romantic period, and stir up the controversy that became known as the Vitalism Debate in 1816-20.

  In 1813, Banks had carefully supported the election of Lawrence to the Royal Society, at the strikingly early age of thirty. Two years later, in 1815, Lawrence was given his first academic appointment of real public significance when he was made a Professor of Anatomy at the Royal College of Surgeons. Promotion within the medical profession was still largely in the hands of an oligarchy, and the appointment depended on the good offices of his mentor John Abernethy. As Abernethy himself had long held one of these professorships, this was an expression of great personal confidence. A glittering career now opened before Lawrence under the wing of Abernethy.

  John Abernethy was a powerful ally, at the height of his powers and influence. Born in 1764, he had originally trained at the world-famous medical schools at Edinburgh, then came south to study under the great surgeon John Hunter (1728-93), working among the bodies at his grim dissecting rooms in Windmill Street. (There is a curious Ackroydian historical resonance in the fact that a century later this became the home of the first English burlesque and nude tableaux shows.) Later he pursued a successful career in surgery, built a highly lucrative practice as a consultant physician in Mayfair, and was appointed senior surgeon at Bart’s Hospital in 1815. At fifty-one he was at the top of his profession, and also held a Professorship of Anatomy at the Royal College of Surgeons.