Mike Jay
Mike Jay has written extensively on the cultural history of science, medicine, drugs, madness and politics. He’s the author and editor of nine titles including The Air Loom Gang (of which Oliver Sacks wrote, “I have never seen the logic of madness so clearly and convincingly expressed…a wonderful book”) and The Unfortunate Colonel Despard, hailed as “popular history at its best” by the Times.
Mike Jay’s latest book The Atmosphere of Heaven, published in April, details the life of Dr. Thomas Beddoes and his “unnatural experiments”. His biography of the renegade doctor has received much advance praise, with Oxford University’s George Rousseau writing: “The pursuit of science in the evolution of culture does not get much more hair-raising than this. Mike Jay’s The Atmosphere of Heaven has an uncanny ability to bring everything together through Dr. Thomas Beddoes’ experimental gases…this is history written as it should be.”
Mike is also the editor of several books, including the collection of drug literature Artificial Paradises, which Ian McEwan called “a superb anthology - scholarly, penetrative, mind-expanding”. He is currently editing a volume on the medical history of London for the Wellcome Trust and his articles and essays have appeared in the Times Literary Supplement, the Guardian, the Independent and BBC History Magazine.
“Enthralling. This is exactly the kind of cross-cultural biography we need. Lively and sympathetic, it restores the renegade Dr. Thomas Beddoes to his rightful place in scientific history, but also to his revolutionary circle of literary friends.”
Richard Holmes
Links:
- Adventures in the fourth dimension: the time machine and the birth of cinema
- Interview with Mike Jay
