Medical Ecstasies: Chemical Synthesis and Self-Experimentation in Romantic Science and Poetry
European Romantic Review January 2, 2019 Neşe Devenot
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...