José Ramón Bertomeu-Sánchez

Animal Experiments, Vital Forces and Courtrooms: Mateu Orfila, François Magendie and the Study of Poisons in Nineteenth-century France

Summary The paper follows the lives of Mateu Orfila and François Magendie in early nineteenth-century Paris, focusing on their common interest in poisons. The first part deals with the striking similarities of their early careers: their medical training, their popular private lectures, and their first publications. The next section explores their experimental work on poisons by analyzing their views on physical and vital forces in living organisms and their ideas about the significance of animal experiments in medicine. The last part describes their contrasting research on the absorption of poisons and the divergences in their approaches, methods, aims, standards of proof, and intended audiences. The analysis highlights the connections between nineteenth-century courtrooms and experimental laboratories, and shows how forensic practice not only prompted animal experimentation but also provided a substantial body of information and new research methods for dealing with major theoretical issues like the absorption of poisons.

Looking for an Order of Things: Textbooks and Chemical Classifications in Nineteenth Century France

Abstract The purpose of this paper is to reconsider the issue of the creativity of textbook writing by exploring the links between nineteenth-century French textbooks and the quest for a classification of elements. The first section presents the elegant combination of didactic and chemical constraints invented by eighteenth-century chemists: the order of learning — from the known to the unknown — and the order of things — from the simple to the complex — were one and the same. In section two we argue that the alleged coincidence did not help the authors of elementary textbooks required for the new schools set up by the French revolution. Hence the variety of classifications adopted in the early nineteenth century. A debate between natural and artificial classifications raised a tension in the 1830s without really dividing the chemical community. Rather it ended up with the adoption of a hybrid classification, combining the rival natural and artificial systems.

Moving Localities and Creative Circulation: Travels as Knowledge Production in 18th‐Century Europe

In recent historiography of science, circulation has been widely used to weave global narratives about the history of science. These have tended to focus on flows of people, objects and practices rather than investigating the spread of universal patterns of knowledge. The approach has also, to a great extent, concentrated on colonial contexts and treated ‘European science’ as a more or less homogeneous knowledge realm. Furthermore, these studies of circulation have usually been tied to a contextualist view of knowledge formation in which locality is taken as a set of specificities linked with particular locations. In this article we redirect the focus of the discussion on circulation to Europe, and reference spaces that are often absent from other scholarly accounts. We will ground our discussion on a comparative study of three travelling actors from the European periphery through whom we will introduce the notion of ‘moving locality’ in order to depict circulation as a knowledge production process per se.

Louis Jacques Thenard's Chemistry Courses at the Collège de France, 1804–1835

Abstract This article is concerned with the public courses and lecture demonstrations given by Louis Jacques Thenard at the Collège de France during the first decades of the nineteenth century. The expectations and needs of Thenards auditors will be studied in order to understand the role played by chemistry courses at the Collège in the context of the growing and changing Parisian teaching market during the first third of the nineteenth century. The preparation and performance of lecture demonstrations was the main driving force of several major changes in the premises and the personnel associated with the chair of chemistry. Our analysis of the parallel process of expansion and functional differentiation of spaces and personnel will show the multiple interactions taking place between the research and teaching activities developed by Thenard and his team of assistants and students.

Beyond Borders in the History of Science Education

In this chapter, I explore the interactions between the new history of science education and the research agenda of the group “Science and Technology in the European Periphery” (STEP). While reviewing the contributions made by STEP members to this field, I discuss some missed opportunities and challenges faced by peripheral contexts in mainstream narratives of the history of science education. Many authors have called for cross-national studies and the application of a comparative approach to the history of science education, but studies of this kind are few. They require researchers to use sources written in several languages and to master a wide range of local studies and highly fragmented secondary literature. Multinational groups such as STEP are promising forums for promoting a project of this kind, but many barriers, and not only national borders, still persist. In this paper, I consider two interrelated problems: the tensions and connections between different bodies of scholarship in the history of science education, and the problems facing the construction of a global, decentred narrative in the history of science.

Chemistry, microscopy and smell: bloodstains and nineteenth-century legal medicine

Summary This paper analyses the development of three methods for detecting bloodstains during the first half of the nineteenth-century in France. After dealing with the main problems in detecting bloodstains, the paper describes the chemical tests introduced in the mid-1820s. Then the first uses of the microscope in the detection of bloodstains around 1827 are discussed. The most controversial method is then examined, the smell test introduced by Jean-Pierre Barruel in 1829, and the debates which took place in French academies and learned societies during ensuing years are surveyed. Moving to the courtrooms a review is conducted of how the different methods were employed in criminal trials. By reviewing these cases, the main arguments against Barruels test during the 1830s are explored as well as the changes making possible the return of the microscope to legal medicine around 1840. By reconstructing the history of these three methods, the paper reveals how the senses of smell and vision (colours and microscopic images) were employed in order to produce convincing evidence in both academies and courts. The paper questions two linear master narratives that are organized in terms of progress and decline: the development of forensic science as a result of continued technological progress; and the supposed decline of smell in the history of the senses, particularly in the realm of chemistry and medicine.

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 Orfilas 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 Orfilas 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.

The Truth About the Lafarge Affair: Poisons in Salons, Academies, and Courtrooms During the Nineteenth Century

This chapter, by focusing on the famous Lafarge affair (1840), reviews the movement of poisons across different popular, medical, and legal cultures. In the first section, it offers an introduction to three main protagonists: the poison (arsenic), the defendant (Marie Lafarge), and the most famous expert (Mateu Orfila). In the next part, it follows the metamorphosis of the debate from criminal courts to amphitheaters and academies. The chapter also review the debate in salons, literary fiction, and other spaces of popular culture. It then discusses how the Lafarge affair was employed in the early years of the so-called scientific criminology. Finally, and taking into account the previous ingredients, the chapter reviews the context in which the most famous movie on the Lafarge trial was produced.

La terminología química durante el siglo XIX: Retos, polémicas y transformaciones

Abstract This paper deals with the appropriation of the new chemical terminology in late nineteenthcentury Spain. It analyses the perceptions about the advantages and problemes generated by the new terminology. The study sheds light on the nature of the current terminology, its circulation and uses in classrooms and the causes of its constant transformation. In tune with current studies on the circulation of scence, the paper discusses practices of negotiation, appropriation and resistance related to the spread of scientific terminology. The historical perspective offers evidence about the collective and provisional character of scientific terminology and encourages the search for renovated links between history and didactics of science.