The Watt Family, Thomas Beddoes, Davies Giddy, Humphry Davy, and the Medical Pneumatic Institution, Bristol

This essay, eschewing the use of meta-narratives such as Enlightenment, Romanticism or Industrialisation, examines in detail the role that the Watt family (James senior and his sons James junior and Gregory) played, first, in establishing the Medical Pneumatic Institution (MPI) in Bristol and, second, in securing the employment of the nineteen-year old Humphry Davy to be the Institution’s Superintendent. The radical physician Thomas Beddoes wanted to investigate, using an apparatus developed by Watt senior, the possible therapeutic effects of gases discovered during the eighteenth century. To facilitate developing pneumatic medicine Beddoes organised a national fund-raising campaign to establish the MPI. In doing this he was supported (including financially) by the Watt family and by others such as Tom Wedgwood. By the middle of 1798 sufficient funds had been obtained and Beddoes began looking for a Superintendent to run the MPI. Davies Giddy and Gregory Watt successfully recommended Davy to Beddoes, who appointed him in October 1798. Davy spent two and a half years at the MPI, during which he discovered the physiological effects of nitrous oxide and undertook his earliest electrical researches. Understanding the course of these events at the level of detail used here suggests the limited explanatory value of meta-narratives.