Medical Ecstasies: Chemical Synthesis and Self-Experimentation in Romantic Science and Poetry

ABSTRACT

Contributing to recent scholarly interest in the cognitive and perceptual ideas that informed Romantic interest in transcendence, this paper argues for a common self-experimental method underlying Humphry Davy’s medical experiments with nitrous oxide and the composition of lyric poetry by William Wordsworth and Samuel Taylor Coleridge. Romantic poets and scientists adopted the formal method of self-experimentation to intentionally test the repeated effects of an independent variable (whether a psychoactive chemical or natural scenery) on the experimenter’s body, mind, and overall wellbeing, and each subsequently packaged these variables in a format capable of disseminating ecstatic states to others for the purposes of physical and psychological healing. In tracing these common aims and methodologies across Romantic science and poetry, I argue that Davy’s nitrous oxide research contributed to the development of an “ecstatic paradigm” in the sense proposed by Thomas Kuhn: an intellectual framework for perceiving, interpreting, and generating states of ecstasy.

Acknowledgments

The author expresses thanks to Michael Gamer, Charles Bernstein, John Tresch, and Richard Doyle for their feedback in developing this article.

Notes

1. Davy’s self-experimental investigations clashed with increasingly dominant views about legitimate experimental methods and data in the practice of chemistry. While the chemist of an earlier generation had trained and refined the body’s “sensuous technology” to read subtle signals of chemical composition in tastes, scents, and color, the “new” chemist viewed evidence from the senses as inexact, incomplete, and inconclusive (Roberts 515). Contemptuous of subjective, experiential reports for their lack of standardization, the “new” chemists based knowledge claims on objective measurements that relied on increasingly specialized and expensive laboratory instruments. In so doing, they insisted on a Newtonian view of material reality as inherently stable and uniform, where the “real” was increasingly synonymous with the “measurable.” For a concise discussion of the “fundamental shift” towards objective measurements in the “Chemical Revolution” at the end of the eighteenth century, see Roberts and F. Holmes. Daston and Galison extend this trajectory into the nineteenth century with an analysis of the emerging notion of scientific “objectivity” as synonymous with impersonal detachment from the object of study. For a discussion of Davy’s new “chemical phenomenology” and its radical departure from this shift, see Ford. Golinski notes that despite the tensions posed by his self-experimental methodology for the emerging paradigm of objectivity, Davy’s later career helped to usher in the “new chemistry” through his embrace of increasingly sophisticated laboratory instrumentation for precise and standardized measurements. See especially 34–40 and 108–09.

2. For a discussion of the “metaphysical conundrums” posed by nitrous oxide and its influence on Davy’s views about materialism and idealism, see Golinski 31–33; and Robertson.

3. On poetry’s role in Davy’s experimental methodology, see Jay, High Society 76–79; Jay, The Atmosphere of Heaven 179–83; and Golinski 24–28.

4. It was common for intellectuals of the Romantic period to move fluidly between the humanities and the sciences, as strict demarcations between these disciplines were not yet codified. Although Davy saw himself as more scientist than poet, he wrote poetry throughout his life, and his personal notebooks “contain a mixture of poems, fragments, experiments and notes” (Amin 93-94). For descriptions of Davy’s poetry, see especially Fullmer 102-05; and Ruston 152-54. In addition to writing his own poetry, Davy assisted Coleridge and Southey in preparing their publications. Before Davy left Bristol for London in 1801, he corrected the proofs of the second edition of Coleridge and Wordsworth’s Lyrical Ballads, and he would supervise the printing of Southey's epic poem, Thalaba (Sharrock 57 and Knight 38). In a July 1800 letter in which Coleridge solicited Davy to examine the sheets of Lyrical Ballads, Coleridge expressed a desire to immerse himself in the study of chemistry (Sharrock 60). In addition to studying chemistry as a means of acquiring insight into the inner workings of nature, Coleridge also determined to learn chemistry as a source of poetic material (Levere 28-30).

5. For a discussion of references to “the sublime” at the Pneumatic Institute, see “Humphry Davy and the Sublime” in Ruston 132-74; Gabriel; Stanback 127-31; and Golinski 26-28.

6. This thread of Mitchell’s argument is mirrored in a description from Timothy Leary’s 1968 book, High Priest: “The mind [of ordinary waking consciousness] is a neurological method for screening out all but a few redundant, static, conditioned, socially consensual ideas. The mind is the repetitious narcotic, addictive, redundant neural looping designed by the DNA code to limit consciousness. Like heroin focuses the behavior of a junkie, so does the mind focus the billion-fold avalanche of neurological activity” (159).

7. Richardson describes the neural sublime as “a nontranscendent or even anti-transcendent sublime” (13).

8. For a brief discussion of New Historicism’s skepticism towards the social value of Romantic lyric, see Mason 106; and Robertson 592-93. Mason cites the work of Jerome McGann, James Chandler, Marjorie Levinson, and Alan Liu as emblematic of this approach. Robertson describes New Historicism’s role in making scholars “uneasy” with Romanticism’s “preoccupation with transcendent experiences” during the last quarter of the twentieth century (592). In line with a recent scholarly turn to considering transcendence in light of Romantic ideas about medicine, consciousness, and perception, this paper supports Robertson’s argument that “the Romantic turn to poetry and imagination was not necessarily a flight from social reality, but an experimental response to social ills that made use of the latest scientific ideas” (595).

9. Richard Doyle describes the effects of Romantic poetry and psychedelic chemicals alike as inducing “ecodelic” insights—“the sudden and absolute conviction that the psychonaut [or reader] is involved in a densely interconnected ecosystem for which contemporary tactics of human identity are insufficient,” which entails “a sudden apprehension of immanence” and “a connectivity that exceeds the rhetorical capacities of an ego” (20). Doyle suggests that the resulting sensitivity to relationships with the natural world constitutes a therapeutic response to environmental exploitation, facilitating awareness about the importance of ecological sustainability and partnership.

10. See Golinski 30.

11. In light of Roget’s concern for “accuracy of comparison,” it is arguably significant that Davy’s associate would go on to compile “Roget’s Thesaurus”—the most famous thesaurus of the English language—only a few years later, in 1805. Indeed, the original edition was titled in full, Thesaurus of English Words and Phrases, Classified and Arranged so as to Facilitate the Expression of Ideas and Assist in Literary Composition. It is likely that this interest in “facilitating expression” was inspired by the need for metaphors to describe nitrous oxide’s effects. See Stanback 127.

12. For recent scholarship on the relationship of Romantic science and poetry, see Fulford; Richardson; and R. Holmes.

13. See Ross, “Poetic Scientist”; and Ross, “Romantic Kinship.”

14. In Jackson’s view, this fact invalidates “historicist” attempts to reduce the self-consciousness and introspective tendencies of Romantic lyric to “political escapism tout court” (120).

15. In keeping with the objective specificity of the greater Romantic lyric, Coleridge’s precision of detail reveals this landscape as intimately familiar: these are clearly trails he has walked many times before.

16. Nor was this desperate sense of lack an isolated idiosyncrasy in Davy’s research circle: “The desire of some individuals acquainted with the pleasures of nitrous oxide for the gas has been often so strong as to induce them to breathe with eagerness, the air remaining in the bags after the respiration of others” (556-57).

17. For a detailed description of the salutary motivations informing Wordsworth’s “therapeutic poetics,” see Budge 48-76; and Youngquist, who specifies that “Wordsworth imagined himself a healer, a physician of the body armed with the materia medica of a physiological aesthetics” based on “a serious engagement with the claims of neurophysiology” (154).

18. Despite Davy’s interests in the originality of Consolations, scholars have charted out the text’s many literary influences and historical precedents. See especially Golinski 153-78; Hessel; and Secord 24-51.

19. For the full passages, see Davy, Researches 457-547; and Davy, Consolations 16-59.

20. See Leask 170-228.

21. See Abrams, The Milk of Paradise.

22. See Timár.

23. On the prefaces to “Kubla Khan” and the poem’s relationship to opium, see Schneider.

24. For a discussion of this programmatic function of psychedelic “trip reports,” see Doyle.

25. See Diehn 28–30; and Devenot 367–68.

26. The recent “psychedelic renaissance” of mainstream academic research in the sciences has been the subject of feature articles in the New York Times and New Yorker magazines; see Slater and Pollan. For a peer-reviewed analysis of the resurgence of psychedelic research in universities, see Tupper et al.