the students seemed drawn to the gas-filled mask and began breathing much more heavily from it.
The author notes that the effects on the participants “were various sudden and truly astonishing” (1). On pages 101-102 of the manuscript, Graham gives the following descriptions of some of the behavior exhibited by those who inhaled nitrous oxide:
Its first and general effect was to make them very polite; first bowing to professor Hare; then to the students, then strutting around the room; then dancing and hollowing — Now attacking the whole house knocking down some and running over others. — Mr. Fountain of Va first became very polite making bows to all those around him and then dancing, the effect lasted about one minute. His pulse was quick frequent and rather corded: his face alternately flushed and pale (1).
Graham goes on to note that Mr. Fountain described feeling ill afterwards but that most of the volunteers felt a very comfortable taper that lasted for a while “after its more violent effects were over” (1).
Graham also states that the gas had no positive effect at all on one of the students, but rather left him “as if he had awakened suddenly from a dream: he looked dejected and mortified” (1). The author describes two other students somewhat differently. One goes about the room making grand gestures like an actor in a tragedy, while the other at first seemed to be enjoying the experience immensely only to get very sick and faint. Eventually, all the participants returned to their normal states.
At the time Graham’s manuscript was written in roughly 1827, demonstrations of this nature at the University of Pennsylvania Medical School were done by chemistry professors. In the one detailed by Graham which took place in February 1819, the professor was Robert Hare, Jr. (1781-1858), who held the position during Graham’s time in Philadelphia (4). Graham described Hare thusly: “His Head resembles the buffaloes; his labour the ox — good chemist, experiments well, but explains badly“ (1). Hare spent almost his entire life in Philadelphia, largely due to the fact that his father, Robert Hare, Sr., had been a trustee at the University of Pennsylvania. The family owned a brewery and that had a large impact on the younger Hare’s desire to study chemistry and he eventually started attending the University’s lectures (5) (6).
Robert Hare, Jr. became fascinated with gases through his chemistry work and when the brewery failed in 1815, he unsuccessfully attempted to manufacture illuminating gas. He invented many things, including the calorimeter and the precursor of the blow torch by burning a mixture of hydrogen and oxygen formed from electrolysis, which subsequently led to the creation of the platinum industry. He became acquainted with the much older Joseph Priestley, who had moved to Pennsylvania from London, and Priestley was the first person that Hare showed the “oxyhydrogen torch” (5). It is possible that from this contact Hare’s interest in nitrous oxide was spurred. Hare was the professor of chemistry at the medical school, the largest in the country then, from 1818-1848, which meant that he taught a substantial number of America’s 19th century physicians (4). Due to his position’s responsibilities and his personal interests, Hare would conduct experiments and demonstrations for classes and occasionally the general public on novel scientific advancements of the time, such as with nitrous oxide (4, 6).
The venue for these large demonstrations of nitrous oxide use was often a lecture hall of some sort. Graham writes that “Doct[or] Hare exhibited the effects of the Nitrous Oxyd-gas; in the old University. The room below and the circular gallery above was crowded with spectators and students” (1, 3).
In addition during this time period, travelling lecturers would encourage members of the general public to attend “ether frolics” where either diethyl ether or nitrous oxide would be inhaled. First, these lecturers wanted to demonstrate to people the mind-altering powers of these substances. Second, members of the crowd not under t