A series of lectures including refreshments and buffet lunch

“O! Excellent Air Bag”: Thomas Beddoes and the Pneumatic Institution by Mike Jay

This paper tells the story of Erasmus Darwin’s protégé Thomas Beddoes and his experiments with medical gases at the Pneumatic Institution in Bristol, in which he collaborated with a remarkable circle of scientists and poets that included Humphry Davy, James Watt, Samuel Taylor Coleridge and Robert Southey.

 Mike Jay is an author and historian who has written widely on the history of science, medicine and culture, and contributes regularly to the London Review of Books, among other publications. His books include Free Radicals: How a Group of Romantic Experimenters Gave Birth to Psychedelic Science.

 Beddoes and the Romantic Poets’ by Tim Fulford

As well as being a pioneering medical researcher and geologist, Beddoes was a poet. My paper looks at his interactions with Erasmus Darwin, Coleridge, Southey and Wordsworth – at the radical poetic experiment he made when he encountered Darwin’s Botanic Garden and at the parody he published of Wordsworth’s simplistic Lyrical Ballads – which gave great offence.   Beddoes also treated the poets’ ailments – physical and mental – and used his contacts to get them work for the newspapers.  His ideas about children’s education – learning by investigating and handling objects in the environment – fed into some of the greatest poems in the English language – Wordsworth’s Prelude and Coleridge’s Frost at Midnight.

 Tim Fulford is the editor of Thomas Beddoes’s Collected Correspondence – newly published by Cambridge University Press.   He’s published many books on Romantic poetry, including Coleridge, Wordsworth, Southey and Erasmus Darwin.

A Daughter of the Enlightenment: Hidden in Plain Sight by John Lovell Beddoes

This paper looks at the growth of one woman’s place in the historical record and the potential for the rediscovery of long-hidden women to inspire fresh perspectives on 18th century culture. Anna Beddoes, sister of Maria Edgeworth and wife of the physician Thomas Beddoes, was, until recently, known only as a small side character in the wider drama of Bristol’s Pneumatic Institute, the gathering place of scientists and men of letters including Humphry Davy, Peter Mark Roget, and Samuel Taylor Coleridge. John Lovell Beddoes has spent the past 40 years tracking down Anna’s letters and rediscovering her in her own words. Now the letters edited by Tim Fulford and Sara Slinn and assisted by John Beddoes have been published by the University of Chicago Press in a special edition of The Wordsworth Journal, and a full-length biography is being prepared.

John Lovell Beddoes is an independent scholar and a visiting fellow at De Montfort University and has collected Beddoes family history for the past 40 years. He was a founder member and chair of the Thomas Lovell Beddoes Society and in 2013 was the driving force in bringing about the world’s first production of Beddoes’ play ‘Death’s Jest Book’ at Fordham University, New York. He has collected and researched over 500 unpublished letters and manuscripts associated with Dr Thomas Beddoes and Anna Beddoes, as well as discovering an original portrait of Anna. John is the 2^nd Cousin, five times removed to Dr Thomas Beddoes.

Beddoes at the bedside: research-based medicine at the end of the 18th century by Sara Slinn,

Like Erasmus Darwin, Thomas Beddoes was something of a celebrity physician, sought out by the rich and influential, as well as offering medical services to those who could not have afforded his fees. I’ll be talking about Beddoes’ work as a physician, thinking about how a practice could be so successful when very few of his novel approaches apparently bore fruit.

Sara Slinn is a historian who has worked variously on the education, careers and aspirations of clergy, poets and scholars. For the past 4 years she has worked on the project to edit Thomas Beddoes’ correspondence, during which time she learnt to grapple with his drug prescriptions and understand something of his pharmacological practice.

Carrie Dunne, ‘The Shadow of Consumption’

This presentation follows the desperate search during the 1790s of the Edgeworth family in the hope of halting the fatal disease. The family travelled to Hotwells in Bristol, a place known for its healing waters and where the philanthropic Medical Pneumatic Institution had been set up by Dr Thomas Beddoes, the chemist and physician and husband of Anna Maria. Working for Dr Beddoes, the young and enthusiastic Humphry Davy, the poet and chemist, ensured the Institution became the centre of Pneumatic Medicine. Edgeworth family members, scientists and poets, such as Samuel Taylor Coleridge, flocked to Bristol to volunteer in the experiments. The publications by Dr Beddoes and Davy provide an insight into their work, including observations of the effects on patients and volunteers when inhaling nitrous oxide, thought to be the cure-all at the time. The presentation, however, concludes with the unexpected outcomes of Pneumatic Medicine experimentation, and, for the Edgeworth family, its ultimate failure.

Carrie Dunne: after retiring from teaching science, training teachers, publishing teaching materials and inspecting schools for Ofsted, I decided to have another challenge and study for an MA (Biography by Research) at the University of Buckingham.