Dr Thomas Beddoes: chemistry, medicine, and the perils of democracy.

Beddoes lectured on chemistry at Oxford in the years that included the French Revolution, the Terror, and the outbreak of war with France, as well as the success in France of the chemical revolution. The very public dispute between Edmund Burke and Joseph Priestley meant that the latter's study of different kinds of air was politically tainted. Beddoes's democratic beliefs and his support for the new chemistry of Lavoisier meant that as chemist and physician he had to deal with complaints that he was potentially seditious and pro-French. His medical theories, allied to pneumatic chemistry and building on the work of Priestley, were accordingly suspect. In spite of that, he became the physician and friend to several members of the Lunar Society of Birmingham and to members of their family, and they in return became his patrons. His collaboration with James Watt was crucial for his development of pneumatic medicine. The full extent of Lunar patronage, and especially that of James Keir and Thomas Wedgwood, has hitherto not been recognized, but it was the concealed scale of that patronage that made possible the execution of Beddoes's ambitious programme of treatment and research.

"Inhale it and see?" The collaboration between Thomas Beddoes and James Watt in pneumatic medicine.

The collaboration of Thomas Beddoes and James Watt in the development of pneumatic medicine--the treatment of disease by the breathing of airs--is well known but little understood. Its protagonists presented the venture as an empirical one, in which the efficacy of different airs was tested independently of theoretical considerations. Historians have generally accepted that claim at face value. We contend, on the contrary, that the divergent theoretical chemical commitments of Watt and Beddoes significantly shaped their different approaches to, and their interpretations and expectations of, the pneumatic project. In particular, Beddoes's broad adherence to Lavoisian chemistry gave him an oxygen-centred approach to pneumatic medicine, while Watt's ongoing belief in phlogistic chemistry inclined him to expect great things of "hydrocarbonate." In addition, we show that a close examination of Watt's experiments and writings in his collaboration with Beddoes reveals a great deal about Watt's chemistry of airs.

Public and private science at home and abroad: networks among chemists, physicians and industrialists in the 1780s.

The tensions between public and private science, so familiar to us today, were alive in the science of the industrial revolution. These tensions confronted the members of a society of chemists and natural philosophers, physicians, industrialists and instrument makers who met in London from 1780 to 1787. Their meetings, held in private rooms in coffee houses, provided an ideal forum for their blend of public and private science, reinforced by a vital international network of scientific intelligence. The records of those meetings tell us a good deal about communication among natural philosophers in the 1780s, and show that some, at least in Britain, were well-informed about the latest foreign developments.