Dr. Thomas Beddoes (1760–1808): Chemistry, Medicine, and Books in the French and Chemical Revolutions

Abstract

Dr. Thomas Beddoes was a mere bit-player in Britain’s cultural history, as Roy Porter has told us; but his career, seen through correspondence, notes, publications, and instruments, invites us to reassess several key aspects of the history of late eighteenth-century chemistry. He was not highly skilled in the chemical laboratory. His main medical research project, based on the hope that different gases would have therapeutic effects on a variety of disease, was a failure. Nonetheless he continues to tantalize historians of chemistry and medicine. There are already three biographies of him, and a further study is in preparation. Here, I wish to examine his medical chemistry or chemical medicine, his role as a truly European chemist and physician, his engagement with industrial chemists and engineers in the Lunar Society of Birmingham, and the chemical, medical, and political networks to which he belonged or contributed. Iatrochemistry has been little considered in the late eighteenth century, but it was important, in ways that Beddoes helps us to understand. Nationalism is often identified with the different parties engaged in the Chemical Revolution, but the case of Thomas Beddoes makes it clear that internationalism is also important. The debates between the new and the old chemistry are often made to revolve around two issues, phlogiston and quantification; Beddoes helps us to understand that the chemical debates sometimes had a much broader and more complex underpinning.