Animal experiments, vital forces and courtrooms: Mateu Orfila, François Magendie and the study of poisons in nineteenth-century France.

The paper follows the lives of Mateu Orfila and François Magendie in early nineteenth-century Paris, focusing on their common interest in poisons. The first part deals with the striking similarities of their early careers: their medical training, their popular private lectures, and their first publications. The next section explores their experimental work on poisons by analyzing their views on physical and vital forces in living organisms and their ideas about the significance of animal experiments in medicine. The last part describes their contrasting research on the absorption of poisons and the divergences in their approaches, methods, aims, standards of proof, and intended audiences. The analysis highlights the connections between nineteenth-century courtrooms and experimental laboratories, and shows how forensic practice not only prompted animal experimentation but also provided a substantial body of information and new research methods for dealing with major theoretical issues like the absorption of poisons.

[Protomedicato and pharmacy in Castile at the end of the sixteenth century: "Catálogo de las Cosas que los Boticarios han de tener en sus Boticas" (Catalogue of the things that apothecaries must have in their shops), by Andrés Zamudio de Alfaro, Protomédico General (1592-1599)]. / Protomedicato y farmacia en Castilla a finales del siglo XVI: edición crítica del "Catálogo de las Cosas que los Boticarios han de tener en sus Boticas," de Andrés Zamudio de Alfaro, Protomédico General (1592-1599).

In this article we present a catalogue of medicinal products preserved in a manuscript copy among the papers of a druggist who died in Madrid in 1599. This catalogue, whose title expresses its normative character, contains 423 entries and is signed by Andrés Zamudio de Alfaro, Protomédico General of Castile from 1592 until his death in 1599. It was presumably issued by the Real Tribunal del Protomedicato during the last decade of the sixteenth century for the use of the protomédicos and examiners who carried out official visits to apothecaries under the aegis of the Tribunal, in accordance with the royal decrees of 1588 and 1593, and was also distributed among the apothecaries themselves and their suppliers, such as the druggist who possessed the copy edited here. The document offers valuable evidence of the policy of normalization of medical, and specifically pharmaceutical, practice imposed during this period by the State through the Protomedicato.

¿Es ilegal el ejercicio médico de la homeopatía en Venezuela? / Is the medical exercise of homeopathy legal in Venezuela?

Se hace un análisis de la legislación venezolana vigente que incluye: la Constitución Nacional, la Ley de Ejercicio de Medicina, otros decretos e informes para conocer cual es la situación legal del método homeopático en la República de Venezuela