Free Radicals

The story of the circle of scientists, poets and dissidents who discovered laughing gas—and forever changed our understanding of the mind

An unlikely circle of doctors, chemists, poets and political radicals formed a group round the maverick physician Thomas Beddoes. In the closing years of the eighteenth century, he founded the first modern medical institute, the Pneumatic Institute in Bristol. When he and its researchers discovered the mind-altering properties of nitrous oxide, or laughing gas, what was a pioneering public health initiative became a freewheeling exploration of consciousness.

Celebrated historian Mike Jay tells the story of Dr. Beddoes and his group of unorthodox experimenters. With the support of Erasmus Darwin and poets Robert Southey and Samuel Taylor Coleridge, a laboratory designed by James Watt and funded by Thomas Wedgwood, and the self-experimenting chemistry assistant Humphrey Davy, Beddoes precipitated a revolution in scientific investigation.

Free Radicals for the first time charts the intellectual ferment of the Institute and reveals its crucial influence—as the crucible of the Romantic movement, and the birthplace of modern drug culture.