Humphry Davy Nearly Died Laughing

Surgery in the 18th Century was a brutal affair. Often the last resort treatment for severe wounds, surgery was undertaken in the 18th century only when death was likely as the act often resulted in infection and death anyway.  What was needed, beyond an understanding of germ theory and clean surgical apparatus, was a way to keep the patient still and relieve their pain so that the surgeon could work and this is what young chemist Humphry Davy as attempting to do in 1799 when he undertook a series of self-experiments in which he inhaled increasingly potent doses of nitrous oxide. 

Better known as laughing gas.  Nitrous oxide is a colorless non-flammable gas with a slightly sweet scent and taste.  It now has significant medical uses, especially in surgery and dentistry, for its anesthetic and pain-reducing effects.  Davy called it “laughing gas” because it creates euphoric effects when inhaled.  In 1799, this property that has led to its recreational use.  The British aristocracy would often host “laughing gas parties” where the gas was offered to party guests in a silken bag.  Davy who discovered a means of synthesizing nitrous oxide documented its effects in his 1800 book Researches, Chemical and Philosophical which investigated “nitrous oxide, or diphlogisticated nitrous air, and its respiration”.

Davy recommended that the gas be used as a surgical anesthetic. But physicians scoffed at the idea.  To prove its safety, Davy began a very radical bout of self-experimentation to determine the effects “laughing gas”. With his assistant Dr Kinglake, he would heat crystals of ammonium nitrate, collect the gas released in a green oiled-silk bag, pass it through water vapor to remove impurities and then inhale it through a mouthpiece.

He described the effects as superb – he experienced giddiness, flushed cheeks, intense pleasure, and “sublime emotion connected with highly vivid ideas”. His experiments quickly increased in frequency and also intensity. He began to take the gas outside of laboratory conditions, returning alone for solitary sessions in the dark, inhaling huge amounts, “occupied only by an ideal existence”, and also after drinking in the evening – though he continued to be meticulous in his scientific records throughout. Later in the year he would construct an “air-tight breathing box” in which he would sit for hours inhaling enormous quantities of the gas and have even more intense experiences, on more than one occasion nearly dying.

Eventually, Davy began to allow others to partake.  Healthy subjects were asked to inhale nitrous oxide and then write down their experiences, descriptions which ended up forming more than eighty incredibly entertaining pages in Researches, Chemical and Philosophical (1800).  Laughing gas would not be used in surgery and dentistry until the middle of the nineteenth century.  Abuse of nitrous oxide and “laughing gas parties” remain a social problem today.

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