Skip to main content Accessibility help
×
Hostname: page-component-78c5997874-lj6df Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-11-08T04:47:12.889Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false

Introduction

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  08 January 2010

Catherine Crawford
Affiliation:
University of Essex
Get access

Summary

This book presents new research on the history of legal medicine from the early seventeenth century to the 1960s. It ranges widely in subject matter, from abortion and infanticide to medico-legal education and the politics of the coronership, while its geographical scope extends from colonial Maryland and Enlightenment Germany to Belle Epoque Paris and twentieth-century England. However, this book is not just a sampler of current historical work on legal medicine. It is intended to form a coherent historiographical intervention in a field which has long been studied largely in isolation from social, political, and even legal history.

Much existing historical work on legal medicine lacks a sufficiently strong sense of the ways in which particular historical settings have affected the development of medico-legal knowledge and practice. For want of adequate contextualization, scientific and technical advances have usually been understood in self-referential terms. At the same time, historians' view of not only the history of criminal justice but also, for example, the history of women and the family, of local government, and of health and safety at work has been limited by lack of awareness of their medico-legal aspects. Our aim in this book is to show what the history of legal medicine stands to gain from new approaches to the social history of law and medicine, and to explore some of the ways in which medico-legal history can enrich our understanding of history in general.

Type
Chapter
Information
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Print publication year: 1994

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

Save book to Kindle

To save this book to your Kindle, first ensure [email protected] is added to your Approved Personal Document E-mail List under your Personal Document Settings on the Manage Your Content and Devices page of your Amazon account. Then enter the ‘name’ part of your Kindle email address below. Find out more about saving to your Kindle.

Note you can select to save to either the @free.kindle.com or @kindle.com variations. ‘@free.kindle.com’ emails are free but can only be saved to your device when it is connected to wi-fi. ‘@kindle.com’ emails can be delivered even when you are not connected to wi-fi, but note that service fees apply.

Find out more about the Kindle Personal Document Service.

Available formats
×

Save book to Dropbox

To save content items to your account, please confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies. If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your account. Find out more about saving content to Dropbox.

Available formats
×

Save book to Google Drive

To save content items to your account, please confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies. If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your account. Find out more about saving content to Google Drive.

Available formats
×