Search results
. Why bother? These brief snapshots shine light on the myriad ways in which law and healing interacted in the past. They cannot answer the question: why bother examining medico-legal history? The question assumes that the relationship of law and medicine has a substantive history. In the latter three decades of the twentieth century, the assumption tended to be to the contrary. Medical law was
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.
medical lawyers than virtually any other area in medico-legal history, and alas supports Dworkin’s pessimistic diagnosis. Any account of abortion law from medieval times to the Offences Against the Person Act 1861 reveals that a number of factors, other than fetal status, also influenced the development of English law. They included the dangers to women of crude abortion techniques, social attitudes to
be void’. 45 Coke’s claim that the courts could review and strike down Acts of Parliament never took root in England but was to form at least part of the basis on which courts in the USA assert the right to strike down statutes in conflict with the constitution. Bonham’s Case is examined here as a landmark in medico-legal history. It heralded the re-entrance of another actor in the battles over
Rest in peace? The treatment of the dead body has generated controversy from antiquity, reflecting persistent themes in medico-legal history, the importance of physical bodies and the gulf between popular sentiment and the educated elite. The availability of cadaver organs and other body parts for transplant is of incalculable value to the people whose lives are saved or
unless they violated ‘public decency’. Before addressing Blackstone’s account of crimes directly pertinent to medico-legal history, Blackstone’s more general examination of the basis of criminal law and its roots in Christian religion in Of Public Wrongs is instructive. Blackstone said simply ‘for christianity is part of the laws of England’. 27 The
ready to find against members shown to be incompetent or ‘unduly’ venal. 33 The mists of medico-legal history While there is evidence that claims pursued by dissatisfied patients were frequent in the medieval and early modern era, thorough critical analysis of the cases is difficult, save for expert legal historians. It is a difficulty which applies to other areas of ‘old law