Beddoes, THOMAS

Beddoes, THOMAS, physician, born at Shiffnal, Shropshire, in 1760, passed from Bridgnorth grammar-school to Pembroke College, Oxford, and afterwards studied medicine at Edinburgh and London. In 1788, after taking his M.D. at Oxford, he was appointed reader in chemistry there, but his sympathies with the French Revolution rendered his post so uncomfortable that he resigned it in 1792, and retiring into the country, wrote his work On the Nature of Demonstrative Evidence. Several patriotic pamphlets followed, and the History of Isaac Jenkins, in which he laid down, in a popular style, rules of sobriety, health, &c. for the working-classes. Of this work 40,000 copies were sold in a short time. He married Anna, sister of Maria Edgeworth. In 1798, after careful study of the use of artificial or medicated gases in the cure of diseases, especially consumption, aided by his father-in-law, Mr Edgeworth, and pecuniarily assisted by his friend, Thomas Wedgwood, he opened a 'pneumatic' hospital at Clifton. It did not succeed in its main object, which was to show that all diseases being referable to an undue proportion or deficiency of some elementary principle in the human organism, could be cured by breathing a medicated atmosphere; and Beddoes, whose zeal had abated, retired from it in 1801. He died 24th December 1808. The chief result of Beddoes' enterprise was the introduction to the world of Sir Humphry Davy, who was the superintendent of the institution, and who says of Beddoes: 'He had talents which would have exalted him to the pinnacle of philosophical eminence, if they had been applied with discretion;' and Southey wrote on hearing of his death: 'From Beddoes I hoped for more good to the human race than any other individual.' See the Life of Beddoes by Dr Stock (1811).