Thomas Beddoes

Thomas Beddoes (13 April 1760 – 24 December 1808) was an English physician and scientific writer. He was born in Shifnal, Shropshire and died in Bristol fifteen years after opening his medical practice there. He was a reforming practitioner and teacher of medicine, and an associate of leading scientific figures. He worked to treat tuberculosis.

Beddoes was a friend of Samuel Taylor Coleridge, and, according to E. S. Shaffer, an important influence on Coleridge's early thinking, introducing him to the higher criticism. The poet Thomas Lovell Beddoes was his son. A painting of him by Samson Towgood Roch is in the National Portrait Gallery, London.

Beddoes was born in Shifnal, Shropshire, on April 13, 1760, at Balcony House. He was educated at Bridgnorth Grammar School and Pembroke College, Oxford. He enrolled in the University of Edinburgh's medical course in the early 1780s. There he was taught chemistry by Joseph Black and natural history by Kendall Walker. He also studied medicine in London under John Sheldon. In 1784 he published a translation of Lazzaro Spallanzani's Dissertations on Natural History, and in 1785 produced a translation, with original notes, of Torbern Olof Bergman's Essays on Elective Attractions.

He took his degree of doctor of medicine at Pembroke College, Oxford University, in 1786.

In 1794, he married Anna, daughter of his associate at the Bristol Pneumatic Institution, Richard Lovell Edgeworth. Their son, poet Thomas Lovell Beddoes, was born in 1803 in Bristol.

Beddoes visited Paris after 1786, where he became acquainted with Lavoisier. Beddoes was appointed professor of chemistry at Oxford University in 1788. His lectures attracted large and appreciative audiences; but his sympathy with the French Revolution excited a clamour against him, he resigned his readership in 1792.

Beddoes was a prolific writer from the early 1790s through the 1810s. In January 1792 he wrote his Letter on Early Instruction, Particularly that of the Poor, which described how injustice and oppression provoked mob violence. He believed it was necessary to humanise the “minds of the poorer class of Citizens,” which would involve education, the improvement of material conditions, the removal of abuses, and the denouncement of violence. In the following year he published the History of Isaac Jenkins, a story which powerfully exhibits the evils of drunkenness, and of which 40,000 copies are reported to have been sold. In 1796, Beddoes published An Essay on the Public Merits of Mr. Pitt, which criticised Britain’s prime minister William Pitt’s domestic and foreign policies during the Seven Years’ War with France. He saw Pitts’s policies as ignorant about the conditions of the poor and negligent of the useful applications of scientific knowledge.

Beddoes also advocated for medical reform, attacking the widespread lay practices of self-medication, which he believed were the cause of many unnecessary deaths. Through his writings, Beddoes promoted public education on healthy living, exercise, and public health issues such as tuberculosis. Beddoes also felt that valuable scientific observations and data were going to waste. He actively argued for creating a centrally organised system for collecting, indexing and distributing important medical data to the physicians' community. He proposed a national organisation for preventive medicine upon seeing the worsening condition of the poor and the large number of patients at his pneumatic institution.