Life
Educated at Bridgnorth Grammar School and at Pembroke College, Oxford, Beddoes also enrolled in the University of Edinburgh's medical course during the early 1780s. There he was taught chemistry by Joseph Black and natural history by John Walker. Additionally, he studied medicine in London under John Sheldon (1752–1808). In 1784 he published a translation of Lazzaro Spallanzani's Dissertations on Natural History, and in 1785 produced a translation, with original notes, of Torbern Olof Bergman's Essays on Elective Attractions.
He took his degree of doctor of medicine at Oxford in 1786, and, after visiting Paris, where he became acquainted with Lavoisier, was appointed reader in chemistry at Oxford University in 1788. His lectures attracted large and appreciative audiences; but his sympathy with the French Revolution exciting a clamour against him, he resigned his readership in 1792. In the following year he published the History of Isaac Jenkins, a story which powerfully exhibits the evils of drunkenness, and of which 40,000 copies are reported to have been sold.
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“What is life but the angle of vision? A man is measured by the angle at which he looks at objects. What is life but what a man is thinking all day? This is his fate and his employer. Knowing is the measure of the man. By how much we know, so much we are.”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)