El esqueleto de la viuda Houet: Frenología y medicina legal en Francia durante la década de 1830

This paper deals with the judicial identification of corpses in nineteenth-century France. The case of the widow Houet (1833) is particularly interesting for this purpose because two contrasting techniques of identification were employed: forensic medicine and phrenology. Mateu Orfila, dean of the Paris Faculty of Medicine, had recently developed a quantitative method for the identification of corpses, which was later regarded as a landmark in nineteenth-century forensic medicine. Pierre-Marie Dumoutier, an outstanding member of the Society of Phrenology, analysed the skull and offered surprising data about the personality of the widow. The episode stirred up controversies on the evidentiar…

Arsenical Pesticides in Early Francoist Spain: Fascism, Autarky, Agricultural Engineers and the Invisibility of Toxic Risks

Abstract Lead arsenate was introduced on a massive scale in agriculture in Spain in the early 1940s. With the support of a network of agricultural engineers, the new Francoist state encouraged the production and use of lead arsenate as the main weapon against a newly arrived pest, the Colorado potato beetle. In this paper I discuss arsenical pesticides as sociotechnological products which played a pivotal role in the joint production of both chemical-based agriculture and the emerging Francoist regime in Spain during the 1940s. I review the campaigns organized by agriculture engineers and the making of the new National Register for Phytosanitary Products in 1942. The new regulations promote…

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 Eur…

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 in…

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 fragmente…

Introduction. Pesticides: Past and Present

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

El articulo comienza con un analisis las principales caracteristicas de la reforma de la terminologia quimica de finales del siglo XVIII. Nuestras principales fuentes son los testimonios de autores espanoles que realizaron o tradujeron obras relacionadas con la quimica. A traves de sus palabras, describiremos las criticas y las resistencias a la reforma terminologica de 1787 para mostrar las razones que condujeron a la persistencia de voces antiguas durante todo el siglo XIX y, en algunos casos, hasta nuestros dias. Analizaremos tambien los problemas que introdujo la constante aparicion de nuevas sustancias, particularmente en el caso de la quimica organica, donde apenas fue posible aplicar…