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RESEARCH PRODUCT

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

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AbstractThis 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, an...