The “Leeds Portrait” of Joseph Priestley

Joseph Priestley, natural philosopher.

In this two hundredth anniversary year of his death, we are met to celebrate the life and career of Joseph Priestley—and most of us celebrate the wrong man, for the wrong reasons. We celebrate the pneumatic chemist who, in a flurry of random experiments made over a period of five years, isolated and partially identified nine new gases, including oxygen—and the man who spent roughly five times a...

Joseph Priestley, oxygen, and the enlightenment.

Joseph Priestley (1733–1804) was the first person to report the discovery of oxygen and describe some of its extraordinary properties. As such he merits a special place in the history of respiratory physiology. In addition his descriptions in elegant 18th-century English were particularly arresting, and rereading them never fails to give a special pleasure. The gas was actually first prepared b...

"Thomas Reid's Critique of Joseph Priestley: Context and Chronology"

Joseph Priestley, Adventurer in Science and Champion of Truth

of anatomical specimens, housed in his Museum in Leicester Square and guarded by young William Clift. Matthew Baillie and Everard Home, the executors of Hunter's Will, enlisted the help of Lord Auckland and Sir Joseph Banks (the President of the Royal Society), and by their influence a Committee of the House of Commons was appointed and the result was that the Government granted £15,000 to purc...

Joseph Hippolyte Cloquet (1787–1840)— Physiology of smell: Portrait of a pioneer

While the physiology, histology and stem cell biology of smell are active fields of contemporary research, smell is probably the sense that physicians knew the least about prior to the 20th century. Joseph-Hippolyte Cloquet (1787–1840) was an anatomist who, in 1815, defended a singular doctoral thesis—On odours, the sense of olfaction and the olfactory organs—then went on to publish, in 1821, t...