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Law and healing is a colourful and critical account of the longstanding ‘marriage’ between two fundamental pillars of human society, law and medicine. The book addresses medico-legal history, exploring aspects of English law’s fascinating and sometimes acrimonious relationship with healing and healers. It challenges assumptions that medical law is new and that when law engaged with medicine, judges deferred to the ‘medical man’. It traces the regulation of healing from the dominance of the Church, and goes on to examine how the battles between different groups of lay ‘doctors’, physicians, surgeons and apothecaries were fought out in the law courts, the Royal Court and Parliament. Malpractice litigation and predictions of malpractice crises are shown to date back to the fourteenth century. Evidence of judicial deference is scant until late in the nineteenth century. Medical law today addresses moral dilemmas arising in medical practice and biomedical science. Considering historical perceptions of the human body from the womb to the grave, this work identifies themes persisting through medico-legal history and how history repeats itself. The book assesses both how English law responded to changes in ‘scientific’ understanding of bodies and how ‘science’, or what was thought to be science, influenced law. Bizarre theories about biology are seen to buttress laws of primogeniture and legal incapacities imposed on married women. The book considers how in the nineteenth century medical practitioners gradually acquired a strong voice in law-making on morals as much as medical practice.
Chapter 8 places women centre stage illustrating how belief that women were weak and dangerous united medical practitioners and law makers. Medicine, in the sense of theories of the body and sickness, was deployed to make law and justify exclusion of women from public life. One group of women escaped exclusion and the often-forgotten story of ecclesiastical licensing of midwives in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries is evaluated, highlighting the public duties of the midwife as a guardian of morals as well as the healer caring for birthing women. The sudden demise of ecclesiastical regulation and the take-over of childbirth by the ‘medical men’ is assessed. The imagery of women as both weak and dangerous is shown to buttress the many legal incapacities imposed on women by the common law. Similarly, bizarre theories about reproduction also influenced English law. The chapter demonstrates the high value placed on bloodlines and lineage, what would today be described as genetic identity. It explores the impact of ‘scientific’ (mis)understandings of reproduction in late medieval and early modern England on the development of the law and in particular male primogeniture. The close links between questions of property and reproduction will be analysed and entrenched antipathy to single motherhood examined. The historical themes of emphasis on genetic relatedness, wariness of certain kinds of parenthood and questions of access to regulation of reproduction will be shown to be instructive to modern debates on reproductive medicine and the law.
.indd 83 07/06/2013 09:16 Chaplains in early modern England controversialist to become one of the household chaplains of George Abbot, Archbishop of Canterbury, and, ex officio, ecclesiastical licenser of books for the press, and literary agent and adviser to authors. Yet how typical was the diverse assortment of Featley’s religious, political and literary activities as embassy chaplain, and his subsequent career trajectory? This essay argues, from the evidence of Featley’s ‘experience beyond the sea’ in particular, and of chaplaincies to early modern embassies in
in Freeman himself or his poems but because of the potential depravity of the reader. Robert Hayman’s Quodlibets (1628) offers a clear example of the licensing of epigrams early in the next reign, as one poem directly addresses Dr Thomas Worrall as ecclesiastical licenser: Epigrams in print175 To the Reverend, Learned, and Judicious, Thomas Worall, Doctor in Divinity and Chapaline [sic] to the right Reve. Father in God George, L. Bishop of London. Of my reprehending Epigrams54 It is for one of your gifts, and your place, To looke bold-staring-black sinne in the
was highly unusual for the ecclesiastical licensing bodies in London to reject applications from chemical physicians. The fact that Belon’s testimonials were counter-signed by the old puritan Sir Edward Alston, then president of the College of Physicians, may have been a factor. For Sheldon’s antipathy towards the puritan-dominated College in this period, see my Medicine and the Politics of Healing in Seventeenth-Century England (forthcoming). 29 Belon was seeking protection from wrongful
, thus providing a useful insight into the interconnectedness of medicine and religion in Ireland. She sets out the limited evidence that exists for ecclesiastical licensing and explores the Dublin College of Physicians’s tentative early engagement with the regulation of midwifery. With the emergence of the man-midwife in eighteenth-century Dublin the practice assumed a higher profile, and Gorey also assesses the significance of this key development. Scholars of midwifery and many other aspects of medicine and
Pope’s title was officially denounced in the Ecclesiastical Licenses Act (25 Henry VIII, c. 21) of 1534, which makes repeated references to ‘the Bishop of Rome, called the Pope’. John next dismisses the Pope’s power to ‘tythe or toll in our dominions’. Tithing and tolling are distinct activities. In 1532, Act 23 Henry VIII, c. 20 placed a moratorium
of a local court secular or clerical. In 1533 the practice of sending interrogatories from Rome to England was outlawed by The Act in Restraint of Appeals (24 Henry VIII, c. 12). John’s next lines ridicule the name ‘pope’ and exchange it for ‘Italian priest,’ a common epithet in Shakespeare’s time. But the pope’s title was officially denounced in The Ecclesiastical Licenses Act (25 Henry
combinings [sic] errors which threaten ruine and surprisall to them? Here Prynne complained that even while Parliament was sitting, while its ‘doores of Justice stand wide open’, wicked ecclesiastical licensers were obstructing ‘passage to the Presse’ of righteous books defending Protestant truth. Because of this obstructionism, ‘to you alone (right Christian Senators, and valiant worthies of the Lord) they now addresse their tongue-tide grievances, and silenced complaints: to you they flye for present succour and redresse against their adverse and prevailing powers; and
since Henry VIII published The Ecclesiastical Licenses Act in 1534 (25 Henry VIII, c. 21). I have no doubt that, when Shakespeare-Caesar made his entrance upon stage, in addition to his purple robe he carried a bishop’s crook and wore a mitre, as the historical Caesar had. Shakespeare presented a dumb-show Bishoppe of Rome. In a later chapter on Othello I will demonstrate that Shakespeare also