Bristol. Bulgin and Roser. (1793). pp.72. 8vo. Modern boards. Some minor foxing. ESTC T18371 ODNB In April 1794 Beddoes married Anna, the daughter of Richard Lovell Edgeworth and sister of the novelist Maria Edgeworth. Edgeworth was a member of the Lunar Society of Birmingham as was Darwin. In the 1790s 'Beddoes was part of a group of active opponents of government policy, a group that included the publisher Joseph Cottle, and the poets Robert Southey and Samuel Taylor Coleridge. He was thereby a central player, even a kind of actor–manager, in the early political history and fortunes of English Romanticism. Medically, he began to establish a venue for the use of gases in the treatment of illness, and the Pneumatic Institute was opened in Dowry Square in Hotwells, Bristol, in 1799... By 1802 the Pneumatic Institute had changed its name and its aspirations, becoming the Preventive Medical Institution for the Sick and Drooping Poor. The aim was early treatment, especially in tubercular cases, but many of the rules and practices indicated Beddoes's ambivalent feelings towards the poor. Quacks might prey on them, but many of the poor brought misery on themselves through negligence, laziness, and ignorance. Beddoes never altered his view that the medicine of the future, which he had hoped would be advanced by the use of gases, would always be governed by a new and strengthened medical élite of the right kind.

Order Number: 51092