This song is about Humphry Davy and the Pneumatic Institution.
Lyrics:
Davy's got a hospital in Bristol1
Where he's playing with his bellows in the back
We're the ones to see if you've got TB
Cause we can cure it all with gas.
Dr. Beddoes thinks he's onto somethin'
Carbon monoxide's what he has.2
Breathe it in and you'll never hurt again!
Yes, we can cure it all with gas.
James Watt builds our machines so we'll save his son3
(But confidentially, he doesn't have a chance.)
His dad won't have to know, we'll pump him full of N2O,
Yeah, we can cure it all with gas.
Sir Joseph Banks is beginning to suspect4
That we've made the odd exceptional assumption
But we can prove the treatment's had a great effect
On our own personal consumption5
Davy's got a hospital in Bristol
Where he's holding Mrs. Beddoes in the back6
And easing all his cares by putting on airs7
Yeah, he can cure it all with gas.
Yeah, he can cure it all with gas.
Yeah, we can cure it all with gas.
- In 1798 a nineteen-year-old chemist named Humphry Davy took a job as the laboratory manager for a tuberculosis hospital in Bristol, UK. Britain was in the midst of a tuberculosis epidemic that had been growing for years due to urbanization and poor sanitary conditions. Work had recently been done, by Antoine Lavoisier, Joseph Priestley, and others, to isolate and produce some basic gases such as carbon monoxide, carbon dioxide , and nitrous oxide. The Pneumatic Institution was created by Dr. Thomas Beddoes to investigate the effects these gases had on tuberculosis.
- Beddoes believed that inhaling carbon monoxide in particular held the key to curing many incurable diseases of the time, including tuberculosis. Of course, as we know now, carbon monoxide is in fact a deadly poison.
- James Watt, who had ushered in the industrial era by inventing the condensing steam engine in the 1770s, had already lost a daughter to tuberculosis. When his son Gregory was stricken by the disease he approached Beddoes for treatment, offering to build the machines necessary for the hospital's experimental treatments in exchange for curing his son. Beddoes and Davy made no progress against Gregory Watt's disease, but kept their source of technology happy by regularly administering doses of nitrous oxide to the elder Watt.
- Sir Joseph Banks, the great naturalist who sailed with Captain Cook, was at this time the elder statesman of British science and the Royal Institution. He was suspicious of Beddoes due to Beddoes' support of the French Revolution, and launched an investigation into whether the Pneumatic Institution was truly benefiting its patients.
- "Consumption" was another name for tuberculosis, popular at the time. And of course "personal consumption" now means the amount of money someone spends. This joke is somewhat historically inaccurate; while Beddoes and company did benefit from the hospital, it was not purely a cash grab, and many patients were treated at no charge.
- Before long the young Davy was engaged in an affair with his boss' wife.
- Davy's particular interest, and the one he has been credited for by history, was in the recreational use of nitrous oxide. While the use of carbon monoxide and carbon dioxide naturally did not outlast the Institution, this secondary effect became quite popular and is still practiced today. Unfortunately Davy entirely missed the anesthetic effect of the gas.
Because of Banks' opposition, the personal conflict between Davy and Beddoes, and a new epidemic of typhus in Bristol, the Pneumatic Institution lasted only until 1800.
Humphry Davy went to London to work with Banks at the Royal Institution, where he became a key figure in the rush to identify fundamental elements in the early nineteenth century, becoming the first chemist to isolate potassium, sodium, calcium, magnesium, strontium, barium, boron, chlorine, and iodine. He also invented a lamp that was safe to use in coal mines, a key technology of the Industrial Revolution. With his assistant, Michael Faraday, he pioneered the field of Electrochemistry. He was knighted, served as President of the Royal Society, and in 1819 was the first British scientist to be made a peer. Today he's regarded as one of history's greatest chemists.
Gregory Watt died in 1804. His father continued to invent, and today is known as the father of the Industrial Revolution. The standard unit of power is named the watt after him.
Dr. Thomas Beddoes died in 1808, his theories unsuccessful.
The primary source used for writing this song was The Age of Wonder: The Romantic Generation and the Discovery of the Beauty and Terror of Science by Richard Holmes. That was several years ago, though, and I wrote the annotations from memory with the help of Wikipedia. So you're going to want to doublecheck before you use them for anything.
