The story of a group of scientists, poets, and dissidents who discovered laughing gas—and forever changed our understanding of the mind.

An incredible group of doctors, chemists, poets, and political radicals formed a team around the orchestrator, Dr. Thomas Beddoes. In the final years of the eighteenth century, he founded the first modern medical institution, the Pneumatic Institute in Bristol.

When he and his researchers discovered the mind-altering properties of nitrous oxide, or laughing gas, what initially began as a pioneering public health initiative turned into a free exploration of consciousness.

Esteemed historian Mike Jay narrates the story of Dr. Beddoes and his team of unusual experimenters. With the support of Erasmus Darwin and poets Robert Southey and Samuel Taylor Coleridge, a laboratory designed by James Watt and funded by Thomas Wedgwood, as well as the self-experimenting chemist Humphrey Davy, Beddoes sparked a revolution in scientific research.

Free Radicals for the first time maps the intellectual upheaval of the Institute and reveals its crucial influence—as the cradle of Romanticism and the birthplace of the modern culture of medicines.

Pages: 416, Year of Publication: 0919, Dimensions: 12.7x12.7cm