Observations On The Nature Of Demonstrative Evidence: With An Explanation Of Certain Difficulties Occurring In The Elements Of Geometry, And Reflections On Language
Thomas Beddoes was a prominent English physician, medical chemist, and scientific writer. He is noted for setting up the Pneumatic Institution at Clifton for treating diseases by the administration of gases.
Background
Thomas Beddoes was born on April 13, 1760, at Shiffnall in Shropshire, England. Beddoes’ father was a tanner and wished his son to follow the same trade, but the boy proved bookish. His grandfather, a man of parts, recognized his abilities and insisted that he be trained for a profession.
Education
After being educated at Bridgnorth grammar school and at Pembroke College, Oxford, Thomas studied medicine in London under John Sheldon (1752 - 1808). He enrolled in the University of Edinburgh's medical course in the early 1780s. He took his degree of Doctor of Medicine at Oxford in 1786.
In 1784 Beddoes published a translation of L. Spallanzani's Dissertations on Natural History, and in 1785 produced a translation, with original notes, of T. O. Bergman's Essays on Elective Attractions. After visiting Paris, where he became acquainted with Lavoisier, he was appointed reader in chemistry at Oxford University in 1788. His lectures attracted large and appreciative audiences; but his sympathy with the French Revolution exciting a clamor against him, he resigned his readership in 1792. In the following year he published Observations on the Nature of Demonstrative Evidence, and the History of Isaac Jenkins, a story which powerfully exhibits the evils of drunkenness, and of which 40, 000 copies are reported to have been sold.
Between 1793 and 1799 Beddoes had a clinic at Hope Square, Hotwells in Bristol where he treated patients with tuberculosis. About the same time, he began to work at his project for the establishment of a "Pneumatic Institution" for treating disease by the inhalation of different gases. In this, he was assisted by Richard Lovell Edgeworth.
In 1798 the institution was established at Clifton, its first superintendent being Humphry Davy, who investigated the properties of nitrous oxide in its laboratory. He appointed Davy, then age nineteen, superintendent, and published his first essays on heat and light; like Davy, Beddoes adhered to the kinetic theory of heat. After Davy’s departure in 1801, the Pneumatic Institution became a clinic where advice was given on preventive medicine. The original aim of the institution was gradually abandoned; it became an ordinary sick-hospital and was relinquished by its projector in the year before his death, which occurred on the 24th of December 1808.
Besides the writings mentioned above, he was the author of Political Pamphlets (1795 - 1797), a popular Essay on Consumption (1799), which won the admiration of Kant, an Essay on Fever (1807), and Hygeia, or Essays Moral and Medical (1807). He also edited John Brown's Elements of Medicine (1795), and Contributions to Physical and Medical Knowledge, principally from the West of England (1799). A life of Beddoes by Doctor John E. Stock was published in 1810.
Beddoes supported the French Revolution, and his strong political views partly explain his resignation from Oxford in 1792.
Views
Beddoes was a man of great powers and wide acquirements, which he directed to noble and philanthropic purposes. He strove to effect social good by popularizing medical knowledge, a work for which his vivid imagination and glowing eloquence eminently fitted him.
Beddoes considered it deplorable that although about one person in a million died annually of hydrophobia, and one in a hundred of tuberculosis, everybody dreaded hydrophobia and took tuberculosis for granted. He observed that some occupations carried great risks of consumption and declared that in civilized societies victims were thus sacrificed to alcohol, to fashion, and to commerce. Beddoes agreed that it was foolish to encourage people to doctor themselves, but to persuade them to adopt a healthy way of life, and to learn some biology, seemed eminently reasonable.
He called on doctors to produce more case studies and censured hospitals particularly for their failure to develop adequate statistics; when an adequate supply of genuine facts was available, medicine could be brought to the level of chemistry or astronomy, where charlatans stood no chance of success. Chemistry interested Beddoes primarily because he believed that true medical science must have a chemical basis.
Membership
Beddoes was associated with the Lunar Society of Birmingham during its last years.
Personality
Beddoes' mind was restless, and he died unhappy at his lack of solid achievement.
Quotes from others about the person
"Beddoes was a man of great powers and wide acquirements, which he directed to noble and philanthropic purposes. He strove to effect social good by popularizing medical knowledge, a work for which his vivid imagination and glowing eloquence eminently fitted him." — Encyc.Brit (1911)
Connections
In 1794 Thomas Beddoes was married to Anna, the daughter of Richard Lovell Edgeworth. Their son, poet Thomas Lovell Beddoes, was born in 1803 in Bristol.