Lost threads: recovering the unnarratable in the Bristol Circle drug experiments

Abstract

One difficulty in narrating the history of anaesthesia lies in the complex interweaving of different approaches associated with the British scientists Davy, Brodie and Hickman, the American healers Wells, Morton and Long, and the Japanese physician Hanaoka Seishû. I, however, will focus on the phenomenon of speechlessness that occurred during the first drug experiments performed in Dr. Beddoes' Pneumatic Institution. In the context of the ‘new experimentalism’ that reveals the vagueness and the narrative instability of exploratory experiments, I will have a closer look at the laughing gas experiments conducted around 1800. Here, the precarious relation between experiment and narration is at stake. In the notebooks of Humphry Davy, one can trace the stumbling and stuttering in response to the utterly new experience of time and space. The intoxicated Bristol Circle called for “a new language of feeling” in order to describe the drug-induced journeys between laughter and forgetfulness, pleasure and pain. These extraordinary experiences foregrounded the invention of inhalation anaesthesia. Finally, I will show that the self-experimenters' quest for innovative language has powerful consequences for the historiography of anaesthesia. It must now incorporate the ‘unnarratable’ dimension into its narratives, which favour the orderly sequence of facts.