Mike Jay – Free Radicals – How A Group of Romantic Experimenters Gave Birth to Psychedelic Science

I mean, you’ve got’a laugh, aintcha! Nitrous Oxide made “a picaresque journey from laboratory to lecture hall, variety palace to dentist’s chair.” A substance that does not exist in nature, it fairly blew the minds of the radical scientific community in the late 18th Century when it was isolated and synthesised. Some of them couldn’t decide whether it was more remarkable medicinally or recreationally. What they did know was that it was a wonderful product of a modern scientific sensibility. It is a story that takes in Joseph Priestley, Erasmus Darwin, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Robert Southey, Humphrey Davy, Peter Mark Roget (yes, that Roget), James Watt, and at its centre, … Continue reading →

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