On 21 March 1799, there was an advertisement in the Bristol Gazette for a ‘New Medical Institution … for treating diseases, hitherto found incurable, upon a new plan’. The plan, enshrined in the institution's name, was ‘pneumatic’: to investigate the therapeutic value of the airs that chemists had recently discovered, and to use these airs in ministering to the city's poor. It was, according to its creator and chief Thomas Beddoes, ‘perhaps, the first example, since the origin of civil society, of an extensive scheme of pure scientific medical investigation’. Mike Jay's The Atmosphere of Heaven presents the short lives of the pioneering Pneumatic Institution and its dynamic leader in glorious detail, interweaving an illustrious list of physicians, philosophers and poets who gathered around them between the optimistic early days of the French Revolution and Beddoes's death in 1808, in an account that offers much for both academic and general readers.

Thomas Beddoes is not unknown to historians of science, but his fame now certainly does not represent that during his own lifetime. Polyglot, physician, philosopher, poet and popular novelist, he had, before setting up the institution, reached the position of reader in chemistry at Oxford – he was the university's most popular lecturer – but was blocked from taking the chair when the Home Office intervened. In the official view, he was a ‘most violent democrat’ (p. 68), likely to corrupt young men into political dissent. To rehabilitate his posthumous public profile, Beddoes's widow commissioned his former assistant, John Stock, to write her husband's memoirs, leaving out any controversial politics or personal associations. The result was an uninspiring biography that served only to accelerate Beddoes's departure from popular memory. However, since the latter decades of the twentieth century efforts have been made to return Beddoes to a more prominent position in the historiography of science and medicine, culminating most recently in an issue of Notes and Records of the Royal Society (September 2009) dedicated entirely to his life and works. Notable papers in that volume come from George Rousseau, on Beddoes's blending of enlightenment and utilitarian values, and from Trevor Levere – who has written widely on Beddoes already – presenting the worlds of provincial politics and philosophy that surrounded Beddoes. All recent contributions to the field, Jay's work included, benefit from two earlier book-length studies of Beddoes: Dorothy Stansfield's comprehensive account, Thomas Beddoes M.D. 1760–1808 (1984), which should remain a first reference point for anyone researching Beddoes, and Roy Porter's Doctor of Society (1992), concerned with the man's many opinions on a range of issues. The significant gap that remained in this literature, until Jay's book, was an attempt to understand the Pneumatic Institution's impact and influence, if any, in the many fields of study that it bore upon.

The most obvious achievement of the institution was Humphry Davy, who, in a little over two years in Bristol, went from precocious teenager to one of the most feted experimenters in the country, on the path to becoming a national icon. It was Davy – filling almost as many pages as Beddoes in this book – who discovered a method for isolating pure nitrous oxide and began testing its extraordinary physiological effects. This ‘wild gas’ exceeded even Beddoes's expectations of his new pneumatic medicine at first, providing a successful treatment in early trials on palsy sufferers and the promise of relief to victims of other illnesses. It was equally attractive to the circle of friends gathered around him, keen to share the sublime and stimulating experience of the air-bag: Samuel Coleridge, Robert Southey and Richard Edgeworth were among the participants in Davy's experimentations with the gas. In a particularly accomplished section of the book, Jay subtly links use of nitrous oxide with Coleridge and Davy's adoption of German idealism and the notion of the heroic genius, emphasizing how Davy couched his original experiences of the gas in the language of philosophy when he went into print. ‘Nothing exists but thoughts’, he wrote. ‘The world is composed of impressions, ideas, pleasures and pains!’ (p. 198). Jay also highlights a social element to nitrous oxide's use, with women suffering hysteric attacks from taking the gas in a predominantly male setting, whilst groups sampling the gas outside Bristol felt few of the effects that Davy described. Jay would have done well here to compare nitrous oxide with the earlier practice of mesmerism – especially since both were later contributors to the rise of anaesthesia – and to expand on the experiences in the institution of the thousands of common patients who were treated there.

Despite the threatening and radical background of seditious politics, the story remains almost convivial throughout, in a manner reminiscent of Jenny Uglow's The Lunar Men (2002). Indeed, the two books share many characters as well as the sense of liberalism and creativity at work in the eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century West Midlands and Bristol. Jay's extensive but light-touch use of primary materials, particularly letters of correspondence, depicts Beddoes and his institution at the centre of a network of provincial philosophers battling against the malign control of the London-based rulers of science and society at the time, Joseph Banks and Pitt the Younger. Beddoes is also portrayed as a remarkably prescient thinker, critical of career politicians, the sensationalist press, the wastefulness of meat-eating and the excessive powers of local magistrates – all whilst writing during a recession. Yet the Pneumatic Institution did not fulfil its initial promise (of a cure for consumption), but instead exerted influence in unexpected ways. At the expense of testing pneumatic medicine and the Brunonian system as Beddoes had hoped, Davy rendered his experiments with nitrous oxide as to knock back the institution's – and Beddoes's – critics, and set the tone for his chemical researches to come.

A heady combination of politics and gas, The Atmosphere of Heaven successfully re-establishes the importance of Thomas Beddoes and his Pneumatic Institution in the development of scientific thinking and experimental practice in modern Britain.