Chemistry and forensic toxicology

Chemistry and forensic toxicology Toxicology, alliance of chemistry and medicine, was founded in the 19(th) century by Mathieu Joseph Bonaventure Orfila, a Spanish chemist. He tied this discipline to the notion of forensic in order to emphasize toxicology's implication in suspicious death cases. From the 18(th) century and through the next centuries, lot of chemists allowed forensic toxicology to bloom with their inventions and works applied on toxicology researches. Death evidence in poisoning cases was, from this time, supported by chemical demonstrations. Moreover new molecules synthesized by pharmaceutical industries were born, particularly during the last century. Among them, we can find the benzodiazepines, widely implicated in legal cases, road safety, homicide, poisoning, but mainly found in drug facilitated crimes. In order to detect these molecules, often at a picogram rate, new devices in chromatography and spectroscopy were applied, increasing considerably analytical chemistry's performances which become an excellent tool for signs detection in toxicology.