At the very end of eighteenth century, the distinguished Oxford chemist Dr Thomas Beddoes founded a new private medical research clinic, The Pneumatic Institute, where together with his brilliant assistant Humphrey Davy, he administered experimental treatment of volunteers and medical patients with the psychedelic gas nitrous oxide. Seeking to cure chronic diseases, they instead discovered that the gas had remarkable effects on the mind. Davy was fascinated and although he dubbed the treatment “laughing gas”, he took it much more seriously than that.

The astonishing story of this short–lived, but immensely influential, medical research institute involves a stellar cast of characters: from the socialite and political hostess Georgiana, Duchess of Devonshire, to the scientists James Watt and Erasmus Darwin, not to mention the poets Samuel Taylor Coleridge and Robert Southey.

Mike Jay is an author specialising in psychedelics and the history of drugs. He has published many books on this subject. Mike’s book Free Radicals will be published in the UK by Yale University Press in June. He writes regularly for the London Review of Books and the New York Review of Books. You can read about his work by visiting his website https://mikejay.net/