Calle de Orfila

The name recalls Mateu Orfila i Rotger, born in Mahón in 1787 and settled in Paris, where he signed his work as Mathieu. He turned poisons into a science: before him, proving a poisoning before a court barely rose above suspicion; his Traité des poisons was the first to set out how to trace toxic substances in the body and opened the way to forensic medicine. His name hit the front pages in 1840 with the Lafarge case. Marie Lafarge stood accused of poisoning her husband with arsenic, and the first autopsies clarified nothing. Orfila was called in, applied the new analytical techniques, and confirmed the presence of the poison. His report weighed on the conviction and made that trial the first in which toxicology took the stand as evidence. The street is short, barely a hundred meters in the heart of Almagro, one of those side streets of stately façades that gave the neighborhood its air of balconies and stone doorways.