Mathieu-Joseph-Bonaventure, the founder of modern toxicology, and one of the most eminent of the French school of medicine during its brightest period, was by birth a Spaniard, and native of Minorca. An island merchant's son looked naturally first to the sea for a profession; but a voyage at the age of fifteen to Sardinia, Sicily, and Egypt, did not prove satisfactory. He next took to medicine, which he studied at the universities of Valencia and Barcelona with so great applause, that the local government of the latter city granted him a pension, to enable him to follow his studies at Madrid and Paris, preparatory to appointing him professor. He had scarcely settled for that purpose in Paris, when the outbreak of the Spanish war, in 1807, threatened destruction to his prospects. But he had the good fortune to find a parent in a merchant uncle at Marseilles, and a patron in the good and great Vauquelin the chemist, who braved the wrath of Napoleon against the Spaniards, claimed him as his pupil, guaranteed his conduct, and saved him from expulsion from Paris. Four years afterwards, he graduated in his twenty-fourth year, and immediately became a private lecturer on chemistry in the French capital. The peace of 1814 reopened to him his native country, to which he considered himself bound to offer his services. Barcelona, however, impoverished by more than its own share of the miseries and devastation of war, was obliged to decline his offer. The talent and energy even of an Orfila could scarcely have withstood the deadening influence of Spanish rule in the days of Ferdinand VII. So apparently thought Orfila himself. For, when invited at a later period by that monarch to fill the vacant chemical chair of Proust at Madrid, he resolved to adhere to France, which became the land of his adoption by letters of naturalization. From that period he had a long career of distinction and unbroken prosperity. In 1819 he was appointed professor of medical jurisprudence, and four years later succeeded his aged patron, Vauquelin, as professor of chemistry in the faculty of medicine at Paris. In 1820 he was nominated dean of that faculty, a high medical honour in France. Under the Orleans' dynasty, honours were lavishly showered upon him; for he became successively member of the Council of Education of France, member of the General Council of the Department of the Seine, and commander of the Legion of Honour. But the republic of 1848 put an end to these adventitious distinctions, and reduced him to his simple professorship. His fame and happiness would have prospered better had he never aimed higher; for as a man in authority, he was eminently unpopular; and as a man of business, he was of necessity withdrawn in some measure from his proper pursuits as a cultivator of science. Chagrin at the treatment he experienced at the hands of the governments which succeeded Louis Philippe is supposed to have shortened his life. He died, after a short illness, in March 1853, in his sixty-sixth year, and in the full possession of his faculties and reputation. Only the evening before his death, he delivered a lecture with his usual animation; and a few days previously, he read a scientific paper before the Academy of Medicine.

Orfila's chief publications are four in number,—on General Toxicology; on Medical Jurisprudence; a treatise on Chemistry; and a treatise on Medico-legal Exhumations. But the medical journals teem with valuable papers from his pen, chiefly on subjects connected with medical jurisprudence. His fame will ever rest mainly on his Traité de Toxicologie Générale, first published in 1814, when he was only in his twenty-seventh year. It is a vast mine of experimental observation on the symptoms of poisoning of all kinds; on the appearances which poisons leave in the dead body; on their physiological action; and on the means of detecting them. When one rises from a perusal of the earliest edition of that work, and considers how vast a proportion of it was at the time entirely new, it is not easy to say whether it is with greater wonder at the immense mass of information he so quickly collected, and, indeed, called into existence, or at the deplorable condition in which toxicology, especially in its relations to the law, must have stood before his researches. Few branches of science, so important in their bearings on every-day life, and so difficult of investigation, can be said to have been created, and raised at once to a state of high advancement by the labours of a single man.

Orfila was superb as a lecturer. Possessed of a diction and method eminently lucid, a magnificent voice nicely toned by a musical ear and practice (it is said he was so admirable a vocalist, that he might have made his fortune as a baritone); discussing a subject of novel and intense interest, and of his own creation; and with an audience of a thousand pupils before him, the most distant of whom he reached with conversational facility; nothing could be more attractive than his lectures on medical jurisprudence, as the writer heard them in 1821. In his frequent appearances as a witness on great criminal trials, he was no less conspicuous for the perfection of his preliminary inquiries, the luminous delivery of his statements in evidence, and his unflinching steadiness under cross-examination. Woe to the criminal whose guilt depended on the ability of Orfila to prove it!

The usage he received in his latter years from the ruling dynasty of France did not take away from his attachment to the medical school of Paris, the scene and source of all his triumphs. In his will he left a fund of no less than 120,000 francs (£5000), to establish prizes in the Academy of Medicine and the School of Pharmacy. According to the fashion of France, in bidding adieu to her great men in science, his funeral was an ovation; and no fewer than six orations were pronounced over his grave in name of various scientific and professional bodies.

(Orford)