In the early 1800s, anyone who was anyone in British high society was part of a hot new trend: inhaling laughing gas. The Public Domain Review takes a look at the nitrous oxide fad and some of its more prominent practitioners, including the poet Samuel Taylor Coleridge:
As Coleridge inhaled and felt its warmth diffusing through his body, he did not reach for extravagant metaphors but stated precisely that the sensation resembled ‘that which I remember once to have experienced after returning from the snow into a warm room’. In a subsequent trial he ‘was more violently acted upon’ and confessed that ‘towards the last I could not avoid, nor felt any wish to avoid, beating the ground with my feet; and after the mouthpiece was removed, I remained for a few seconds motionless, in great ecstacy.’
