Before Oxygen Had a Name: The Origin of Hyperbaric Oxygen Therapy

If you are exploring hyperbaric oxygen therapy in Derby, you might be surprised to learn that the idea of using air pressure as medicine dates back over 350 years, long before anyone even knew what oxygen was.

What Is Hyperbaric Oxygen Therapy?

Today, hyperbaric oxygen therapy (HBOT) combines elevated ambient pressure with increased inspired oxygen. Under these conditions, the lungs absorb more oxygen than at normal pressure, and oxygen dissolves more readily into blood plasma, not just into red blood cells. This allows oxygen-rich plasma to reach areas where normal delivery may be limited.

HBOT is used in defined medical contexts such as decompression sickness, carbon monoxide poisoning, and certain complex wound-healing scenarios under strict clinical protocols.

But where did this idea begin?

1662: Nathaniel Henshaw and the Domicilium

In 1662, oxygen did not yet have a name.

No one spoke about oxygen saturation. No one measured oxygen delivery to tissues. No one understood cellular respiration as we do today.

Physicians knew the lungs drew in air, but the active component inside that air had not yet been isolated. That would come more than a century later, when Joseph Priestley isolated the gas we now call oxygen, and Antoine Lavoisier defined its role in combustion and respiration.

And yet, in this pre-oxygen world, a British physician and clergyman named Nathaniel Henshaw began to ask something quietly radical:

What if the pressure of the air around us could influence the body within us?

It was a question far ahead of its time.

Henshaw called his invention the Domicilium, an enclosed room connected to organ bellows and valves, designed to alter the pressure of the air inside. By manipulating atmospheric pressure, he believed he could change the physiological state of the person within.

He was not practising oxygen therapy as we understand it. The concept of oxygen did not yet exist. Instead, he worked with the idea that air pressure itself could carry therapeutic value.

He believed:

• Higher pressure might support certain acute conditions.
• Lower pressure might help with chronic disorders.
• Pressure changes might influence digestion and some lung-related complaints.

To a modern reader, this sounds both visionary and incomplete. Visionary, because he recognised that the environment around the body could serve as a tool. Incomplete, because the mechanisms we now understand, gas laws, oxygen diffusion, tissue oxygenation, were entirely unknown to him.

That is precisely what makes the story so compelling.

Medicine Before the Invisible Became Measurable

The 1600s were a transitional time for medicine. Physicians were beginning to question older frameworks, but the scientific tools that would transform the field were still in the future.

There were no pulse oximeters, X-rays, or blood tests. No antibiotics or intensive care units. No understanding of cells, mitochondria, or the partial pressures of gases.

Medicine relied on observation, theory, and experiment, often in equal measure. Some experiments were remarkably insightful. Others were flawed. Many were both.

Henshaw’s Domicilium lived in this world. He did not know about oxygen gradients, Henry’s Law, or plasma oxygen content, but he grasped something more general and still deeply relevant:

• The body responds to its surroundings.
• Air is not just empty space.
• Pressure is not merely a background force.

In modern terms, he was intuitively probing what we now call environmental physiology, how external conditions such as pressure shape internal processes.

From Air Pressure to Hyperbaric Oxygen Science

After Henshaw, the story of pressure therapy unfolded slowly and unevenly.

In the 18th and 19th centuries, various forms of compressed air chambers appeared. French physician Junod, for example, used pressurised chambers for pulmonary conditions at pressures significantly above normal atmospheric levels. At the same time, industrial pressures from tunnelling, caissons, and later diving introduced a new problem: decompression sickness.

As engineering advanced, pressure could be measured, controlled, and reproduced more reliably. Physiologists began to study how gases behave under different pressures, how pressure changes affect circulation and gas exchange, and the consequences of rapid versus controlled decompression.

Gradually, two streams of knowledge converged:

• Pressure physiology – understanding what happens to the body under altered ambient pressure.
• Oxygen science – understanding the role of oxygen in metabolism, healing, and survival.

Modern hyperbaric oxygen therapy sits precisely at this junction.

Hyperbaric Oxygen Therapy in Derby at Kubo Wellness

At Kubo Wellness in Derby, we place this question at the centre of how we think about recovery.

Modern hyperbaric oxygen therapy is not Henshaw’s Domicilium. It is more controlled, informed by gas laws, physiology, and safety standards, and integrated into broader, evidence-informed recovery frameworks.

But the philosophical thread is recognisable. The body responds to oxygen. The body responds to pressure. The body responds to light, rhythm, rest, stress, and movement.

In other words, the body constantly adapts to the conditions we place it in.

That is why non-invasive therapies can feel so meaningful when used thoughtfully. They do not force the body into change, they shape the environment so that the body’s own regulatory systems have better conditions to work within.

Hyperbaric oxygen therapy belongs to that wider conversation. It invites us to see oxygen not just as something we inhale, but as a key element in cellular function, one that humans have been trying to harness, in one form or another, for over 350 years.