[3] His lectures attracted large and appreciative audiences; but his sympathy with the French Revolution excited a clamour against him, he resigned his readership in 1792.

He believed it was necessary to humanize the “minds of the poorer class of Citizens,” which would involve education, the improvement of material conditions, the removal of abuses, and the denouncement of violence.

[4] In the following year he published the History of Isaac Jenkins, a story which powerfully exhibits the evils of drunkenness, and of which 40,000 copies are reported to have been sold.

[5] Beddoes also advocated for medical reform, attacking the widespread lay practices of self-medication, which he believed were the cause of many unnecessary deaths.

He actively argued for creating a centrally organized system for collecting, indexing and distributing important medical data to the physicians' community.

He proposed a national organization for preventive medicine upon seeing the worsening condition of the poor and the large number of patients at his pneumatic institution.

As an advocate of public health measures and reforms at a time when England lagged behind France in organized medicine, he believed his responsibility as a physician was to prevent disease through understanding and tackling its social, material, and physiological causes.

[8] Despite the link he saw between proximity to cows and lower incidence of tuberculosis, he remained sceptical when Edward Jenner began using a cow-derived vaccination for smallpox a few years later.

[8] While living in Hotwells he began work on a project to establish an institution for treating disease by the inhalation of different gases, which he called pneumatic medicine.

He strove to effect social good by popularizing medical knowledge, a work for which his vivid imagination and glowing eloquence eminently fitted him.Beddoes became an outspoken supporter of the French Revolution in its early years.