1. Thomas Beddoes was an English physician and scientific writer.
25 Facts About Thomas Beddoes
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Thomas Beddoes was born in Shifnal, Shropshire and died in Bristol fifteen years after opening his medical practice there.
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Thomas Beddoes was a reforming practitioner and teacher of medicine, and an associate of leading scientific figures.
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Thomas Beddoes enrolled in the University of Edinburgh's medical course in the early 1780s.
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Thomas Beddoes took his degree of doctor of medicine at Pembroke College, Oxford University, in 1786.
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Thomas Beddoes visited Paris after 1786, where he became acquainted with Lavoisier.
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Thomas Beddoes was appointed professor of chemistry at Oxford University in 1788.
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Thomas Beddoes's lectures attracted large and appreciative audiences; but his sympathy with the French Revolution excited a clamour against him, he resigned his readership in 1792.
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Thomas Beddoes was a prolific writer from the early 1790s through the 1810s.
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In 1796, Thomas Beddoes published An Essay on the Public Merits of Mr Pitt, which criticized Britain's prime minister William Pitt's domestic and foreign policies during the Seven Years' War with France.
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Thomas Beddoes saw Pitts's policies as ignorant about the conditions of the poor and negligent of the useful applications of scientific knowledge.
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Thomas Beddoes advocated for medical reform, attacking the widespread lay practices of self-medication, which he believed were the cause of many unnecessary deaths.
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Thomas Beddoes felt that valuable scientific observations and data were going to waste.
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Thomas Beddoes actively argued for creating a centrally organized system for collecting, indexing and distributing important medical data to the physicians' community.
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Thomas Beddoes proposed a national organization for preventive medicine upon seeing the worsening condition of the poor and the large number of patients at his pneumatic institution.
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Thomas Beddoes had a clinic in Bristol from 1793 to 1799 and later began the Pneumatic Institution to test various gases for the treatment of tuberculosis.
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Thomas Beddoes wrote more than thirty books, pamphlets, and articles urging these reforms and ideological changes.
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Between 1793 and 1799 Thomas Beddoes had a clinic at Hope Square, Hotwells in Bristol where he treated patients with tuberculosis.
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Thomas Beddoes was a man of great powers and wide acquirements, which he directed to noble and philanthropic purposes.
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Thomas Beddoes strove to effect social good by popularizing medical knowledge, a work for which his vivid imagination and glowing eloquence eminently fitted him.
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Thomas Beddoes became an outspoken supporter of the French Revolution in its early years.
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Thomas Beddoes considered the republic the best political system, having observed the corruption and partisanship of the British Parliament.
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However, even while sympathizing with democratic protest, Thomas Beddoes feared popular insurrection and mob violence.
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Thomas Beddoes was a friend of several members of the Lunar Society of Birmingham, a society of prominent Enlightenment figures.
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Besides the writings mentioned above, Thomas Beddoes was associated with the following:.