Chemistry, Medicine, and Crime: Mateu J. B. Orfila (1787–1853) and His Times (review)

We historians are forever claiming to have unearthed unjustly neglected figures who, if truth be told, roundly deserve their obscurity. The Spanish-born physician and toxicologist Mateu Orfila, however, is a different story, his current neglect all the more surprising given that in his day he was a scientific celebrity, known across Europe for writing the defining textbook on poisons and for testifying in sensational murder trials. The editors of Chemistry, Medicine, and Crime, a volume that grew out of a 2004 conference in Orfila's birthplace, Minorca, offer an explanation for his current obscurity. The paradigmatic view of early nineteenth-century French medicine—advanced, in very different ways, by Michel Foucault and Erwin Ackerknecht—has posited the rejection of science and systematic theory and the triumph of clinical medicine and pathological anatomy. A brilliant laboratory experimentalist who worked at the epicenter of the Faculty of Medicine of Paris (he was its dean from 1830 to 1848), Orfila does not fit into this picture and therefore has been largely ignored. More recent scholars have broadened their views of the era's medical universe, providing space for this eclectic and fascinating collection.

The essays in the first half of the volume address Orfila's place in a rapidly changing world of chemistry. Antonio García-Belmar's essay on Louis-Jacques Thenard, one of Orfila's mentors, fleshes out our understanding of how laboratory experiments were used as teaching tools. María José Ruiz-Somavilla takes on another of Orfila's teachers, Antoine-François Fourcroy, demonstrating how debates about vitalism shaped medical chemistry. Ursula Klein's disciplinary study situates medical chemistry in relation to the emergence of organic chemistry, while Ana Carneiro studies Orfila's successor as chair of chemistry at the Faculty of Medicine, Adolphe Wurtz, whose research program traced a trajectory from organic chemistry to biological chemistry to biochemistry. In her study of German toxicology textbooks, Bettina Wahrig examines toxicologists' struggle to define "poison"—just what distinguished it from a drug?—and the ways in which toxicological research contributed to the creation of what Claude Bernard called "experimental medicine" (p. 154).

The essays in the volume's latter half deal with Orfila's more public face, the man who, in the words of Anne Crowther, "rapidly acquired the sobriquet 'the celebrated Orfila'" (p. 126). He was celebrated for writing Traité des poisons (1814–15), which became the standard toxicology textbook on the Continent for decades, and for transporting his laboratory knowledge into the courtroom during murder trials. Crowther's contribution focuses on Robert Christison, Orfila's British "interpreter and rival" (p. 126), showing how Christison shaped his reputation and career in relation to the icon across the channel.

Christison and Orfila devoted much of their attention to arsenic, a common metal that was also the criminal's poison of first resort. Katherine Watson dissects James Marsh's landmark 1836 test for arsenic, which for the first time allowed tiny quantities of the poison to be isolated from corpses. Whereas earlier arsenic tests often failed to work at all, the problem with the Marsh test was that it worked too well. In his essay on the "LaFarge affair" (1840–41)—a drawn-out criminal drama, followed across Europe, involving a woman accused of killing her husband with arsenic—José Ramón Bertomeu-Sánchez explains that the Marsh test might detect traces of arsenic that had been innocently absorbed rather than criminally administered, and that this problem of sensitivity privileged the sort of academic expertise and political power wielded by Orfila. In the volume's most elegant essay, Ian Burney traces the British rejection of Orfila's startling 1839 claim that arsenic was "a natural constituent of the human body," an assertion that threatened to upset the very possibility of medico-legal certainty. In the book...