It is toxicology, therefore, that provides the principal interest of this collected volume for the historian of medicine, although this topic quite naturally opens onto the wider issue of the evolution of expert witnesses in court. Unlike many such collected volumes, this one remains focused, with many of the papers dealing with the use of analytical techniques to detect poisoning and the challenges presented by this type of evidence in the trials of suspected murderers. The leitmotiv for this series of papers is the idea of making the invisible (the poison hidden in the cadaver) visible (the sensible signs of tests, which could be olfactory or visual), a task that motivated and associated a group of “professional” toxicologists including Robert Christison (Anne Crowther), James Marsh (Katherine Watson), Alfred Swaine Taylor (Ian Burney), and, of course, Orfila himself. Indeed, while he is mentioned in all the papers, Orfila's work is most closely examined by Bertomeu-Sánchez with respect to the notorious Lafarge affair. To be a little more precise, the most prominent subject in this collection is one particularly high-profile toxicological conundrum, the proof of the presence of arsenic in a cadaver. Nevertheless, while Bettina Wahrig situates Orfila in the context of German toxicology, Sacha Tomic adds an interesting complement in his treatment of the development of analytical techniques for identifying alkaloids as poisons, illustrating new technical responses to new toxicological threats. Not all the papers are strictly about toxicology, however, there are also contributions by María José Ruiz-Somavilla and Ana Carneiro that are of interest to those studying the institutional development of biological or medical chemistry, treating the considerable influence of Orfila in these arenas. There are also articles that take on other aspects of Orfila's work, notably Antonio García-Belmar's paper on Louis-Jacques Thenard's chemistry lectures, which deals with the teaching and research practices of one of Orfila's Parisian professors, and Ursula Klein's contribution on Orfila's plant and animal chemistry.
Returning to the issue of toxicology, there is an interesting history that emerges around the notion of “normal arsenic”, which constitutes a technical, legal, and professional problem. After championing the validity of the very sensitive Marsh test for the presence of arsenic, Orfila later suggested that it might be detecting arsenic that was a natural constituent of the human body. This problem provides a nice example of the precarious nature of any test before it is “black-boxed”, rendering the meaning and value of its results incontestable. Indeed, it is precisely its use in the antagonistic environment of the courtroom that destabilized the validity of a test that in the purely scientific context of the chemistry laboratory was accepted as a tricky, but essentially uncontroversial analytical technique. Thus, this history of the Marsh test and “normal arsenic” offers a nice case for those interested in the fate of scientific techniques outside the controlled confines of the laboratory.
Apart from its coherence, another thing that recommends this book is its presentation, with a high standard of editing and an attractive dust jacket. The editors managed to do all this and still offer a hardback at a reasonable price; quite an achievement in these days of the plunging dollar. Overall, I would highly recommend this book to anyone interested in either this central figure in the history of toxicology or the development of scientific expertise in the courtroom.