Medical Ecstasies: Chemical Synthesis and Self-Experimentation in Romantic Science and Poetry

Romantic-era poets and scientists shared a self-experimental method for studying ecstatic states. Humphry Davy tested nitrous oxide on himself, while William Wordsworth and Samuel Taylor Coleridge experimented with natural scenery and poetic composition. Both groups intentionally varied an independent stimulus—a drug or landscape—to observe its effects on body, mind, and well-being. They then packaged these experiences into forms that could transmit ecstatic states to others for healing. This common approach constituted an "ecstatic paradigm" in Thomas Kuhn's sense: a framework for perceiving, interpreting, and generating ecstasy that bridged Romantic science and poetry.

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Abstract

Contributing to recent scholarly interest in the cognitive and perceptual ideas that informed Romantic interest in transcendence, this paper argues for a common self-experimental method underlying Humphry Davy’s medical experiments with nitrous oxide and the composition of lyric poetry by William Wordsworth and Samuel Taylor Coleridge. Romantic poets and scientists adopted the formal method of self-experimentation to intentionally test the repeated effects of an independent variable (whether a psychoactive chemical or natural scenery) on the experimenter’s body, mind, and overall wellbeing, and each subsequently packaged these variables in a format capable of disseminating ecstatic states to others for the purposes of physical and psychological healing. In tracing these common aims and methodologies across Romantic science and poetry, I argue that Davy’s nitrous oxide research contributed to the development of an “ecstatic paradigm” in the sense proposed by Thomas Kuhn: an intellectual framework for perceiving, interpreting, and generating states of ecstasy.