Classrooms, Salons, Academies, and Courts: Mateu Orfila (1787–1853) and Nineteenth-Century French Toxicology

Abstract

This paper analyses the connections between nineteenth-century courtrooms, academies, and laboratories by focusing on the life and works of Mateu Orfila (1787–1853), one of the most famous nineteenth-century toxicologists. At the apex of his career, Orfila moved regularly between his laboratory and his chair at the Paris Faculty of Medicine to meetings of the Academy of Medicine, and the courtrooms in which he was frequently called upon as an expert witness in murder trials. Tracing Orfila's biographical path, this paper deals with four main sites of nineteenth-century toxicology: classrooms, salons, academies, and courtrooms. These sites are understood as both tangible places, whose material features shaped the activities taking place inside, and social and cultural constructs, which constrained, enabled, or encouraged particular practices concerning medicine, science, and law. I pay attention to their location and physical shape, the explicit or implicit rules concerning access and exclusion, and the roles their different inhabitants were expected to play. Finally, I discuss how Orfila's movements contributed to the circulation of data, objects, concepts, epistemic values, and experimental practices from one site to another, which produced some hybridisation of courtrooms and laboratories, classrooms and academy halls. I claim that a biographical approach provides a privileged perspective from which to discuss how physical environment constrains scientific practice, while enlarging our ‘map’ with new spaces and resources for studying the circulation of historical actors, ideas, practices, and material culture at different scales of analysis.