This week, with Priyanka away, it’s a case of Isaac Unleashed – and deviating sharply from the regular People Just Do Something chat.
Apart, that is, from the frequent references to drugs. Last time Isaac was allowed out of the studio he was out in the far reaches of north Bristol talking to anti-Tesla activists. This episode he’s way out west – in Hotwells to be precise – and delving deep into the history of nitrous oxide with Mike Jay, noted drug historian and author of Free Radicals: How a Group of Romantic Experimenters Gave Birth to Psychedelic Science.
Jay’s book explores the group of “scientists, poets and dissidents” – with maverick doctor Thomas Beddoes at their heart – who discovered laughing gas around the turn of the 18th and 19th centuries.
The place? Hope Square in Hotwells, site of the Pneumatic Institute, which was set up by Beddoes to explore the effects of gases on the human body, and is where this week’s interview was recorded.
So who were this group of renegades – which included Romantic icon Samuel Taylor Coleridge? How did their scientific and mind-altering experiments intersect with the politics of the time – which of course saw the French Revolution taking place not so far away? And just how radical were their ideas, which took place against the backdrop of a vastly different Bristol than the activist city of the past few decades?
Find out in this week’s PJDS with Mike Jay – which shows how today’s rebels could learn a thing or two from their counterparts 200 years back. (Although the 21st century’s youth are way better at huffing nos safely, it turns out.)
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