Mike Jay: Free Radicals

Historian Mike Jay introduces us to the circle that formed around the radical doctor Thomas Beddoes in 1790s’ Bristol. This included the young Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Robert Southey, Humphrey Davy and Tom Wedgwood. He was their mentor in medicine, German philosophy and politics; in turn, they participated in his pioneering researches into nitrous oxide (laughing gas), with which he hoped to revolutionise medicine.

Book: Free Radicals, Yale University Press