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Bristol: Printed by J. Mills... For R. Phillips..., 1802, 1803. FIRST EDITION. 3 volumes, 220 x 134 mms., pp. [iv], 92, [2], 94, 84, 98; [iv], 94, 95 [96 advert], 102, [2], 168, 8]; [iv], 208, 86, [2], 96, with each essay separately paginated, contemporary polished half calf, gilt rules across spines, with red morocco titling labels, small circular black numbering labels, marbled boards (very slightly rubbed); upper front joint of volume 1 very slightly cracked, but generally a fine and attractive set. The reputation of Beddoes (1760 - 1808), particularly in the field of medical ethics, benefits from present-day sympathies for the medical problems and pathologies he describers. His topics in these volumes including such matters as the mans of avoiding habitual illness and premature death, personal imprudence, exercise, temperance, scrofula, consumption, nervous disorders, melancholia, etc. However, he also worried about the "evils of consumer goods imported from the emerging empire, such as tea and coffee. To Beddoes, novels were worse still, for by the time he was writing, 'nerve medicine' was all the rage and doctors were taking an interest in the mind" (Madeline Minson, THE (January 2004). DNB notes that Humprhy Davy said of him when he died, that, "at the moment," says Davy, "when his mind was purified for noble affections and great works...," while Robert Southey observed that he had "hoped for more good to the human race [from Beddoes] than any other individual...." Beddoes obtained his M. D. from Oxford, where he had a dispute with Bodley's librarian, John Price, about foreign books and journals. More recently, George C. Grinnell in an article published in 2006 has noted, "The three volumes of Thomas Beddoes' Hygeia: or Essays Moral and Medical, on the Causes Affecting the Personal State of our Middling and Affluent Classes (1802-3) constitute a text that deserves to be read on its own merits for the rich examination it offers of the contours of a deployment of health in Georgian Britain. Hygeia offers a capacious understanding of the 'physical or ideal pleasure and pain' affecting the minds and bodies of the middle classes in Britain, and assigns particular priority to nervous disorders among an increasingly hypochondriacal society" (Studies in Romanticism). Roy Porter, "Plutus or Hygeia? Thomas Beddoes and the Crisis of Medical Ethics in Britain at the Turn of the Nineteenth Century," in The Codification of Medical Morality (1993),, pp. 73 - 91.

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