Conservative politicians, radical philosophers and the aerial remedy for the diseases of civilization

Abstract

This article examines the development of pneumatic medicine as practised by Erasmus Darwin, Thomas Beddoes and Joseph Priestley, and the support for their experimental trials by other Dissenting doctors and industrialists including Boulton, Watt and Wedgwood. The article examines their belief that if one could create the conditions under which `good air' could be manufactured — where the work of Dissenting chemists and doctors was embraced rather than condemned, supported rather than attacked — then conditions, political and medical, under which a healthy country will flourish will prevail. Contra the claim made by Roy Porter that doctors, such as Erasmus Darwin, were `profoundly troubled by what they saw as the counterproductive impact on health produced by the spread of progressive ideas, refined culture, and modern, commercial, urban values', I believe that it was precisely those progressive values that led Dissenting doctors and pneumatic chemists to believe that by applying the same principles that led to the phenomenal industrial and commercial success of their friends like Boulton, Watt and Wedgwood, they could improve population health by attempting to reform simultaneously politics and therapeutics.