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ABSTRACTS
Chemistry,
Medicine and Crime: Mateu Orfila (1787-1853) and his times
Maó,
19th-20th March, 2004.
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José
R. Bertomeu Sánchez
Mateu
Orfila and the affaire Lafarge
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| After
a short illness, Monsieur Lafarge passed away at the dawn
of January,
14th, 1840. His young wife was accused of murder by
poisoning and
put in prison. A week after, local experts were requested
to make
an autopsy and a chemical test. They found traces of
arsenic – its
characteristic garlic smell, a yellow sulphurous
precipitate - but
they could not give a conclusive answer to the court.
Three additional
expertises were made without positive conclusions. Almost
at the same
time, Mateu Orfila was giving a series of conferences the
Paris Academy
of Medicine about a new toxicological device: the Marsh
test. The
new instrument had been introduced in 1836 and Orfila and
other toxicologists
regarded it as a revolutionary method to discover arsenic
in legal
expertises. In September 1840, by applying Marsh’s
apparatus to the
mortal remains of Monsieur Lafarge, he obtained a group
of arsenic
spots and Madame Lafarge was sentenced to life
imprisonment. Not all
the experts followed Orfila in his conclusions. The
physician, socialists
and republican activist François V. Raspail wrote
incendiary leaflets
against Orfila asking for the release of Madame Lafarge.
During the
next year, the debate reached the Academy of Science and
the Academy
of Medicine. The French press gave a large coverage to
the trial and
Marsh test gained a large publicity and became much more
famous than
any other contemporary scientific instrument. Marsh
essays were done
in French saloons, public lectures and even some plays
recreated the
Madame Lafarge’s drama, which has lasted in French
collective memory
until nowadays. Therefore, the affaire Lafarge provides a
large and
rich documentation to explore how a new controversial
test was transformed
into something that all toxicologists took for granted by
the middle
of nineteenth century. The paper explores how Marsh test
was black
boxed in the changing context of nineteenth century
French legal medicine.
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Ian
A. Burney
Bones
of Contention: Orifla, Normal Arsenic, and British
Toxicology
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| Mattieu
Orfila’s announcement in 1839 that arsenic was a natural
constituent
of the human body caused a stir in the British medico-
legal world.
Toxicology at this time was the most conspicuous of the
rising sub-fields
within British medical jurisprudence, its practitioners
busy staking
out its claims as a stable body of expert knowledge that
could be
relied upon by criminal courts, and by the public at
large. Toxicological
proof, in its ideal form, involved the isolation and
extraction of
a "foreign" substance, clearly identifiable as a poison,
from otherwise
"pure," "uncontaminated" flesh. This was by no means a
straightforward
task, however: in the courtroom, a toxicologist’s claim
to have identified
a poison was always in danger of being subverted by other
meanings
attributable to its presence in the body. Substances like
arsenic,
for example, were liable to slip out of the
toxicologist’s definitional
grasp by being designated a medicine rather than a
poison. Orfila’s
"discovery" exacerbated toxicologist’s difficulties in
stabilizing
arsenic, and was accordingly greeted with a combination
of exasperation
and skepticism. Yet at the same time, Orfila was a
significant figure
in British toxicology’s account of its own rise as a
credible science.
The normal arsenic controversy thus raises questions
about the conceptual
foundations of early British toxicology, its relationship
to its continental
counterparts, and its efforts to manage the contested
domain of the
adversarial courtroom. |
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Ana
Carneiro
Organic
and Biological Chemistry in a Medical Context: The
Research School
of Adolphe Wurtz at the Faculty of Medicine, Paris
(1853-1884)
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This paper addresses the
status and relationship
between organic chemistry and biological chemistry while
the Alsatian
chemist Adolphe Wurtz taught and established a research
school at
the Faculty of Medicine of Paris. In 1853, following the
death of
Mateu Orfila and Dumas’s resignation from his
professorship at the
Faculty of Medicine of Paris owing to his political
engagements, their
respective chairs of ‘medical chemistry’ and ‘chemistry’
were combined
into a single one titled ‘organic and mineral chemistry’.
Adolphe
Wurtz, who between 1847 and 1853 held the positions of
agrégé de chimie
and of Dumas’s suppléant at the Faculty of Medicine, was
appointed
professor to this new chair, thereby securing his
position within
the institution. According to various testimonies, his
lectures were
crowded, and his disciple Charles Friedel later made the
comment that
‘it was not simply an audience he [Wurtz] found at the
Faculty of
Medicine but all that was required to create a true
school of chemistry’.
However, a closer examination shows that for a variety of
reasons,
which will be analysed, Wurtz’s research school recruited
most of
his students outside the Faculty of Medicine. His
research programme
focussed mainly on fundamental organic chemistry, and
biological chemistry
was for some time more of a teaching activity than a
strong line of
research. In 1873, Wurtz seems to have overcome his
hesitations regarding
biological chemistry, and while he was Dean of the
Faculty of Medicine,
a separate laboratory for biological chemistry was
created, his disciple
Armand Gautier being appointed its director. |
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Frédéric
Chauvaud
Orfila
and French legal medicine nineteenth-century
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| La
réception d¹Orfila en France fut précoce. Dès le Premier
Empire il
sut trouver le ton pour s¹adresser au monde savant et
séduire les
pouvoirs. Son influence sur la médecine légale fut
essentielle, entre
la fin de la Resauration et la fin de la monarchie de
Juillet. Orfila
charma presque immédiatement les contemporains par sa
personnalité.
Reçu partout avec empressement, il savait ³allier le goût
du monde
et des plaisirs à une facilité extraordinaire pour le
travail². Le
cours de chimie qu¹il ouvrit en 1811 à Paris l¹atteste.
Le soin qu¹il
mettait à le préparer et surtout sa ³parole élégante² lui
garantissaient
le succès et le soutien de Vauquelin ou Fourcroy. En
1819, il devint
professeur de médecine légale à la faculté de médecine de
Paris, avant
d¹occuper par la suite d¹autres fonctions. La monarchie
de Juillet
consacra son triomphe. Il fut à la fois le porte-parole
du pouvoir,
la première personnalité du monde médical, un
administrateur infatigable,
un chirurgien recherché, un chimiste renommé, un expert
judiciaire
sollicité. Il règna sans partage, "ennivré d¹encens", sur
un petit
monde. Toutefois ce sont ses travaux sur la toxicologie
légale et
la médecine légale qui assurèrent aurpès du monde savant
son rayonnement.
L¹ouvrage le plus important fut assurément ses Leçons de
médecine
légale (1821-1823), régulièrement étoffées (Leçons de
médecine légale,
Planches, 1825) puis éditées sous la forme d¹un Traité de
médecine
légale (1847)en 4 volumes qui impressiona le monde
médical et judiciaire
par son approche et son découpage. Pour comprendre la
place prise
par cette somme, il convient à la fois de s¹attacher à
son analyse
interne et aux échos que l¹on peut rencontrer dans les
Dictionnaires,
en particulier le Dechambre, monument lexicographique
édifié à la
gloire de la médecine. Régulièrement, il fut sollicité
pour réaliser
des expertises et La Gazette des tribunaux, le plus
célèbre périodique
judiciaire du siècle, fit de très nombreux comptes-rendus
des procès
d¹assises, restituant pour son lectorat, la parole de
Matthieu Orfila.
Toutefois, pour saisir toute l¹importance de son oeuvre,
il convient
d'abord de s'attacher à son impact auprès des ³médecins
judiciaires²
de sa génération. Comme lui, ils étaient désignés par la
Justice pour
remplir des missions et ont écrit des essais, des manuels
ou des traités,
à l'instar d'Alphonse Devergie, dont la troisième édition
de son livre,
intitulé Médecine légale, théorique et pratique, date de
1852, un
an avant la mort d'Orfila . Mais il importe également de
se placer
à la fin du grand XIXe siècle pour observer la place
qu¹occupent encore
ses recherches, notamment dans le Précis de Charles
Vibert (1896).
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Antonio
García Belmar
Teaching
chemistry for medical students: Public and private
courses of chemistry
in Paris during early nineteenth-
century
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| As
many other contemporary practitioners of chemistry,
teaching activities
played an important role in Orfila's scientific and
professional career.
Orfila lived in a period when chemistry started to no
longer be a
knowledge taught in apothecary workshops and unregulated
public courses
to became an academic discipline included in the
curricula of the
old and new institutions of secondary education,
universities and
technical schools that emerged in the main European
capitals of this
period. This strong process of institutionalisation did
not have as
a consequence the immediate disappearing of the
traditional way of
teaching. Both shared and interacted for decades offering
the new
students of chemistry a network of courses and training
pathways that
each one could follow according to the their necessities
and possibilities,
as well as an ample variety of ways to become a
professional. From
the very first years as student in Valencia, Barcelona
and Paris,
up to his professional zenith in the Faculty of Medicine
of Paris,
the professional and scientific biography of Orfila take
us through
many of these new training and professional itineraries
of the chemistry.
The study of the spaces, contents and practises of the
teaching of
chemistry through the life and work of Orfila has a
double interest.
On one hand it will enable us to get closer to the
institutional and
pedagogical contexts that Orfila crossed as a student or
teacher in
his career. On the other hand it will enable us to know
better this
dimension of Orfila's biography and its meaning as part
of his scientific
activity. |
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Ursula
Klein
The
disintegration of plant and animal chemistry and the
formation of
carbon chemistry around 1830
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| Eighteenth-
century
plant and animal chemistry was not only the chemistry of
substances,
and of reactions of substances, but also the chemistry of
living natural
bodies. In this chemical culture, the objects of inquiry
spanned from
complex organised bodies, such as entire plants and their
organs,
through plants' and animals' anatomy and physiology, to
the extraction
of materials from plants and animals and the natural
materials' analysis
and pharmaceutical application. Chemists' descriptive,
natural historical
goals mingled with their analytical, more theoretical
interests, and
with their interests in medicine and pharmacy. By
contrast, in the
new experimental culture of organic chemistry, or "carbon
chemistry,"
which developed in France and Germany between the late
1820s and the
1840s, chemists were preoccupied with pure organic (or
carbon) compounds.
They performed experiments to investigate the invisible
constitution
of pure organic compounds and their reactions in the
laboratory. In
doing so, they created a plethora of new organic
artefacts which did
not exist in nature outside the laboratory. In particular
the extension
of experimental investigations of a new kind of organic
chemical reaction,
namely substitution reactions, contributed to the
exponential increase
of organic artefacts and a deep transformation of the
meaning of "organic"
compounds. Chemists further established a new kind of
work on paper
to model the constitution and reactions of organic
compounds, and
to create new types of classificatory systems, by
applying Berzelian
chemical formula as papers tools. The new "experimental
culture" of
carbon chemistry excluded objects of investigation that
were traditionally
not studied by way of experimentation, namely plant and
animal physiology,
and the pharmaceutical and medical application of organic
substances.
On an institutional level, the formation of carbon
chemistry went
hand in hand with the formation of other chemical sub-
fields that
were previously included in plant and animal chemistry,
such as physiological
chemistry, medical chemistry, and pharmaceutical botany.
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María
José Ruiz Somavilla
Building
a discipline: medical chemistry in early nineteenth
century
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| On
the basis of a programme established by A.F Fourcroy,
medical chemistry
was developed by systematically applying the resources of
chemistry
for the purpose of building a new pathology. Some of his
followers
and founders of the Société de Chimie Médicale
contributed to the
institutionalisation of this discipline in Paris at the
time of the
Restoration. However, developing contents for this new
discipline
was not the main objective of the society’s promoters.
The persons
who studied pathological processes from the perspective
of chemical
analysis were physicians, pharmacists and chemists that
were not directly
involved in the society. The purpose of this paper is to
analyse,
through the study of papers published in French
scientific journals
and of their authors, the process by which medical
chemistry developed.
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Brenda
White & Anne Crowther
The
toxicology of Robert Christison: European influences
and British
practice in the early nineteenth
century
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| Robert
Christison (1797-1882), the third professor of Medical
Jurisprudence
and Medical Police [forensic medicine] at the University
of Edinburgh,
was the first British exponent of 'modern' toxicology to
acquire an
international reputation. He was viewed as one of the
chief European
toxicologists in Orfila's tradition; a reputation
sustained for some
years particularly by several reprints of his book A
treatise on poisons,
in relation to medical jurisprudence, physiology, and the
practice
of physic (1829). Christison's reputation was also
secured by some
sensational poisoning trials, where he gave evidence for
the prosecution.
We will examine the European influences on Christison's
work, the
reasons for his reputation as a leading toxicologist, and
his influence
on the training of British doctors in toxicology.
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