Hippies Part 3 - The Origins and Development of the Use of Nitrous Oxide

First, I felt that probably all of the essays having to do with nitrous oxide desserved a WARNING.

Here it is. WARNING: Use of nitrous oxide damages your neurological system, including your brain and spinal cord, by destroying the protective sheath of neurons through vitamin B12 deactivation. 

Use has some pretty terrifying effects that I have seen firsthand. So if you want a psychedelic experience, please do not choose this substance. There are much better alternatives.

Now back to the essay. We've covered the use of nitrous oxide by William James and Benjamin Paul Blood among others, but the origins of its use stretch back almost another hundred years...

In 1799, in a laboratory in Bristol, England, a young chemist named Humphry Davy sat in a sealed room breathing a gas he had helped isolate. The room belonged to the Pneumatic Institution, a strange, experimental medical facility funded in part by progressive physicians and wealthy patrons. Davy inhaled deeply, held the gas in his lungs, and then began to laugh uncontrollably. He described a sensation of rapid thought, of heightened awareness, of a kind of intellectual acceleration. “Thoughts crowding upon me with a rapidity almost too great for articulation,” he wrote. At one point, he became convinced that he had discovered a fundamental truth about existence, a truth so simple and overwhelming that it could not be expressed. He tried to write it down. Later, when he read the notes, they made no sense.

Davy was not alone. The Pneumatic Institution had been set up by Thomas Beddoes, who believed that gases might cure disease. Patients, doctors, and visitors were invited to inhale various substances. Nitrous oxide, which Davy called “laughing gas,” quickly became the most popular. People reported euphoria, altered perception, and bursts of insight. The gas was passed from person to person in bladders and inhaled in controlled doses. Davy began to suspect that its effects went beyond medicine. In 1800, he published Researches, Chemical and Philosophical, in which he suggested, almost casually, that nitrous oxide “may probably be used with advantage during surgical operations.” The suggestion would not be taken up for decades. But something else in the book lingered: the idea that the gas revealed something about the mind itself.

After the Pneumatic Institution closed, nitrous oxide did not disappear. It moved out of the laboratory and into public life. By the 1820s and 1830s, traveling showmen were staging demonstrations across Britain and the United States. Audiences gathered in lecture halls and theaters. A volunteer would be brought on stage, fitted with a bag and mouthpiece, and encouraged to inhale. Within minutes, they would stagger, laugh, shout, or collapse, to the amusement of the crowd. These were not scientific experiments. They were spectacles. But they created a new kind of familiarity. People saw, again and again, that inhaling a gas could produce a dramatic change in consciousness.

In December 1844, in Hartford, Connecticut, a dentist named Horace Wells attended one of these demonstrations. A man under the influence of nitrous oxide injured his leg but seemed not to feel pain. Wells watched closely. The next day, he arranged an experiment. He inhaled the gas himself while another dentist extracted one of his teeth. He later reported that he felt nothing. Wells began using nitrous oxide in his practice, attempting to introduce it as a method of painless surgery. The idea was radical. Surgery at the time was defined by pain. Wells traveled to Boston to demonstrate the technique at Massachusetts General Hospital, but the demonstration failed. The patient cried out. Wells, humiliated, left the field.

But, by the middle of the century, nitrous oxide had found a position, albeit an unstable one. It was used in dentistry, occasionally in surgery, widely in public entertainments, and intermittently in private experiments. It was known to alter consciousness, but no single institution controlled its meaning. It existed in overlapping networks—medical, commercial, and intellectual.

Then, in the 1860s and 1870s, individuals began to return to it for a different purpose. Not to cure disease, not to entertain, but to explore the mind.

In upstate New York, Benjamin Paul Blood inhaled nitrous oxide during a dental procedure and experienced what he later described as a complete revelation. He believed, in that moment, that he understood the structure of reality itself. The insight was immediate and total. But when the gas wore off, he could not reconstruct it. He spent years trying to describe what had happened. In 1874, he printed a pamphlet in Amsterdam, arguing that the experience revealed a truth that could not be captured in ordinary language. He insisted that it was not madness, but a higher form of understanding. He admitted that others would not believe him.

Blood was not part of a laboratory. He was not connected to a major institution. His work circulated privately, passed from hand to hand. But the idea: that a chemical substance could open a door to a deeper layer of consciousness, began to take hold.

At Harvard, in the 1870s and 1880s, William James was conducting his own experiments. He obtained nitrous oxide and inhaled it repeatedly, often alone. He described the experience in careful detail. Under the gas, he felt that contradictions dissolved, that opposites reconciled themselves, that the structure of reality became clear. He wrote down sentences during the experience, long chains of words that seemed, at the time, to contain profound insight. Later, reading them sober, he found them trivial or incoherent. Still, he insisted that something real had occurred. The experience, he argued, revealed a form of consciousness normally inaccessible.

James did not treat this as a curiosity. He incorporated it into his thinking. In lectures and writings, he began to argue that ordinary waking consciousness was only one form among many, and that other states, whether induced by chemicals, illness, or emotion, might reveal different aspects of reality. He referred explicitly to nitrous oxide, describing how it produced “a sense of a deeper meaning” that could not be dismissed simply because it was chemically induced.

The idea spread, but not through formal institutions. It moved through correspondence, private experiments, and small publications. People like Blood wrote pamphlets. James read them, cited them, and passed them to students. Others tried the gas themselves. There was a growing recognition that the boundary of the mind might be chemically altered.

At about the same time, nitrous oxide became more standardized as an anesthetic. Dentists used it routinely. Its effects were measured, controlled, and limited to the management of pain. The same substance that produced visions and philosophical speculation was also accepted as a practical tool. By the end of the century, the two uses existed side by side: practical medical technology, and as a means of exploring consciousness. 

James continued to refer to the gas into the early twentieth century. In his writings on religion and psychology, he treated the experiences it produced as evidence that the mind could access states beyond ordinary awareness. He did not claim that the insights were "true" in any straightforward sense. But he refused to dismiss them. He argued that they had to be taken seriously, as data. What was happening was a new category of experience was being created...one that could be induced, described, and debated, but not easily explained.