Free for King’s College London staff and students.

Contact events.ioppn@kcl.ac.uk to receive the password when booking your ticket.

Tickets £4.80 - available here at KCL's eStore

 

In conversation:

Mike Jay - author of Free Radicals and other books chronicling the discovery, use and misuse of drugs such as High Society, Mescaline, and Psychonauts

Dr Matt Butler - Wellcome Doctoral Clinical Research Fellow in Neuropsychiatry, IoPPN

Chair: Dr Tim Nicholson, Reader in Neuropsychiatry, IoPPN

Mike Jay will discuss with Dr Matt Butler the fascinating stories and cast of characters involved in the discovery of laughing gas (nitrous oxide) which is the subject of his latest book Free Radicals.

This will be followed by an audience Q&A chaired by Dr Tim Nicholson.

 

Free Radicals (Yale Press, 2025)

Originally published in 2009 as The Atmosphere of Heaven, this revised and updated edition traces the story of the circle of scientists, poets and dissidents who discovered laughing gas—and forever changed our understanding of the mind

The motley group formed around the maverick physician Dr Thomas Beddoes, who, in the closing years of the eighteenth century, had founded the Pneumatic Institute in Bristol, the first modern medical institute. When he and allied researchers discovered the mind-altering properties of nitrous oxide, or laughing gas, what was a pioneering public health initiative became a freewheeling exploration of consciousness.

Celebrated historian Mike Jay tells the story of Dr Beddoes and his group of unorthodox experimenters. With the support of Erasmus Darwin and poets Robert Southey and Samuel Taylor Coleridge, a laboratory designed by James Watt and funded by Thomas Wedgwood, and the self-experimenting chemistry assistant Humphrey Davy, Beddoes precipitated a revolution in scientific investigation. 

Free Radicals charts the intellectual ferment of the Institute and reveals its crucial influence—as the crucible of the Romantic movement, and the birthplace of modern drug culture. 

Reviews

“Fascinating, exciting, entertaining. . . . Jay’s description of the wild highs induced by nitrous oxide is a tour de force, and so is his account of the bad trips, and the no-trips, it soon also turned out to deliver. . . . [A] superb book, learned and full of insight. . . . I can hardly think of a bad word to say against it.”—John Barrell, London Review of Books

“Jay wonderfully restores Beddoes’s reputation as a courageous and painstaking scientist, physician, revolutionary firebrand and social reformer—truly, one of the giants of rational thought.”—Jay Rath, Fortean Times

‘Magnificent!’ – Oliver Sacks