Humphry Davy
In Bristol in 1799, a young man started to experiment with newly discovered gases, looking for a cure for tuberculosis. Humphry Davy, aged 20, nearly killed himself inhaling carbon monoxide. Nitrous oxide was next. It was highly pleasurable, \u2018particularly in the chest and extremities\u2019 and he began to dance around his laboratory \u2018like a madman\u2019, before passing out. By day, he gave the gas to patients, carefully noting their reactions. In the evenings, he invited his friends over to have a laugh (with assistants on standby to revive them with oxygen, as needed).\n \nThe Romantic poets, Robert Southey and Samuel Taylor Coleridge could barely contain their excitement.\nDuring one session, Davy noted that the gas numbed his toothache and suggested that it could perhaps be used during surgical operations. But it was another fifty years before nitrous oxide was used by doctors. Throughout the 20th century, it was widely used during dentistry and to numb the pain of childbirth. (Nitrous oxide is the gas in \u2018gas and air\u2019: the \u2018air\u2019 is oxygen) .And it still is today, but less so. (It\u2019s a potent greenhouse gas that damages the ozone layer, it\u2019s difficult to store and there are side-effects). But, just as medical use is diminishing, recreational use is on the rise.\n \nA new generation of pleasure seekers have started experimenting, just as Davy did, despite the associated risks of injuries caused by fainting and death by suffocation.\n \nNaomi Alderman tells how a gas that created \u2018ecstatic lunatics\u2019 came to be used as an anaesthetic, with help from biographer, Richard Holmes and anaesthetist, Kevin Fong.
Picture: Humphry Davy and Anaesthesia, Credit: Science Photo Library