ABSTRACT
This chapter examines the scientific writings of Thomas Beddoes to consider how pneumatic medicine, or treatment via the inhalation of gases, contributed to the radicalization of health, embodiment and preventative medicine by the end of the eighteenth century. Scholarship on the Pneumatic Institute has primarily used it as a case study for thinking through the roles of self-experimentation and narrative in Romantic scientific method, but this chapter instead considers Beddoes’ contributions toward a “revolution” in medicine which contributed to a particular conception of the population as being in need of preventative care. Beddoes’ desire for an “improvement” of medicine presumes a valuation of health across the national population framed as both achievable and precarious. Drawing on Rosemarie Garland Thomson’s arguments for “disability conservation,” the chapter historicizes the counter-eugenic logics latent within theories of preventative medicine that continue to underpin Western notions of health.
