Beddoes
Collier's New Encyclopedia (1921)
THOMAS , an English phy- 13, 1760; educated at Oxford, London, and Edinburgh . doctor's degree and visiting Paris, he After taking his was appointed Professor of Chemistry at Oxford. There he published some exvations" on the calculus, sea scurvy, concellent chemical treatises, es, and "Obsersumption, catarrh, and fever. His expressed sympathy with the French revolutionists led to his retirement from his professorship in 1792, soon after which Nature of Demonstrative Evidence," and he published his "Observations on the the exceedingly popular "History of sister of Maria Edgeworth; and in 1798, Isaac Jenkins." In 1794 he married a with the pecuniary aid of Wedgwood, opened a "pneumatic" institution for curhalation of gases. It speedily became an ing phthisical and other diseases by inordinary hospital, but was noteworthy as connected with the discovery of the properties of nitrous oxide, and as having been superintended by the young Humphry Davy. Beddoes' essays on "Consumption" (1779 ), and on "Fever" had a high contemporary repute. He (1807), and his "Hygeia " (3 vols., 1807), died Dec. 24, 1808. BEDE or BÆDA, the greatest figure in ancient English literature, was born near Monkwearmouth, Durham, about 673. Left an orphan at the age of six, he was educated in the Benedictine Abbey at Monkwearmouth, and entered the monastery of Jarrow, where he was ordained priest in his 30th year. His industry was enormous. Bede wrote homilies, lives of saints, hymns, epigrams, works on grammar and chronology, and the great "Ecclesiastical History of England," in five books, gleaned from native chronicles and oral tradition. This was translated from Latin into Anglo-Saxon by King Alfred. The first editions were issued from Strassburg in the 15th century. He died in the monastery of Jarrow, May 26, 735.
What Has Changed in the Last Century
The biographical facts Collier's set down in 1921 still stand: Beddoes did open his Pneumatic Institution at Bristol in 1799 with Wedgwood money, did employ the young Humphry Davy, and did marry Anna, sister of Maria Edgeworth. What has moved is the estimate of the work. The gas-inhalation cures for phthisis that Collier's calls merely "noteworthy" produced Davy's account of nitrous oxide, which was ignored as a surgical anaesthetic until Horace Wells and others took it up in the 1840s, while consumption itself was finally treatable only after streptomycin in 1944; and Beddoes is now as often met as the father of the poet Thomas Lovell Beddoes as in his own right. On the Bede notice that follows, one point has quietly given way: the Old English version of the "Ecclesiastical History" is no longer credited to King Alfred's own hand but to an anonymous Mercian translator.
Written for this edition, 2026.