Law and Legacy in Medical Jurisprudence

Graeme Laurie stepped down from the Chair in Medical Jurisprudence at the University of Edinburgh in 2019. This edited collection pays tribute to his extraordinary contributions to the field. Graeme often spoke about the importance of 'legacy' in academic work and forged a remarkable intellectual legacy of his own, notably through his work on genetic privacy, human tissue and information governance, and the regulatory salience of the concept of liminality. The essays in this volume animate the concept of legacy to analyse the study and practice of medical jurisprudence. In this light, legacy reveals characteristics of both benefit and burden, as both an encumbrance to and facilitator of the development of law, policy and regulation. The contributions reconcile the ideas of legacy and responsiveness and show that both dimensions are critical to achieve and sustain the health of medical jurisprudence itself as a dynamic, interdisciplinary and policy-engaged field of thinking.

Exploring the Basis for the Increasing Medical Negligence Claims in South Africa

Litigation arising from medical negligence have continued to witness an incremental trajectory in the contemporary South African medical jurisprudence. As the number of claims continue to rise, so also does the financial expense in the form of cost of litigation on the part of the litigants and damages paid by the healthcare personnel and government agencies in successful cases. Such expense, however, palls into oblivion when compared with the reputational damage attendant such negligent conducts on the parts of both the healthcare personnel and the healthcare institutions. On the positive side, however, is that the growing instances of such claims have brought to the fore the need to interrogate the reasons and seek solutions with a view to attaining a more efficient health service delivery system in the country.

Detention of Private Persons by Private Persons as a Delictual Wrong: Liability for Deprivation of Liberty in Scots Private Law

Jonathan Brown is a lecturer in Scots Private Law at the University of Strathclyde in Glasgow. Previously he was a lecturer in law at Aberdeen’s Robert Gordon University. Jonathan considers himself to be a private law generalist and dabbling legal historian. His recent publications include work on medical jurisprudence, the law of defamation and the relation between the Roman law of slavery and modern Scottish human trafficking legislation. The present essay is intended to provide a modern account which places acts amounting to wrongful detention effected by private persons within the taxonomy of iniuria.

AN AYURVEDIC REVIEW ON UNRAVELING THE GOLDEN GOODNESS OF HRUDAYAVARANA

Ayurveda is the eternal science in which we can dig out all the current scenario of emerging diseases and their remedies. Ayurveda, the science is very vast as an ocean. For the sake of its benefit, it is divided in to eight branches. Agad tantra evam vyavahara ayurveda is one among the eight branches which deals with the concept of toxicity, its treatment, forensic medicine and medical jurisprudence. Ayurveda Samhita well mentioned all the Sthavara (Plant origin), Jangama (Animal origin) and Krithrima (Artificial) visha (poison), its Symptoms and Management. Charaka Samhita mainly adopted the Chaturvimsadi Upakrama (Twenty-four treatment modalities) for the man- agement of Vishas. Hrudayavarana is one among the Twenty-four treatment modalities used as a preventive, cura- tive and emergency management in toxic conditions. Visha having properties opposite to that of ojas, whereas ojas helps to sustain life in the body. Keywords: Chaturvimsadi Upakrama, Hrudayavarana Ojas, Rasayana

Neela Thotha (Copper sulphate): An important mineral drug of Unani medicine to be used in the management of various ailments

Neela Thotha (Copper sulphate) is a mineral origin drug in Unani system of medicine (USM). Chemically, it is known as copper sulphate that formulated as CuSO4. It is used by various Unani scholars to manage different ailments in effective and safe manner as Mufrad (single) and Murakkab (compound) form viz. Amrad Jild (skin disease), Amrad Chashm (eyes diseases), Amrad Nizam Hadm (GIT diseases), Amrad Tansuliya (sexually transmit diseases), Amrad Dimag (brain diseases), Amrad Tanffus (respiratory disease) and Poisoning of certain substances. A review was done by bibliographic database from ScienceDirect, Medline, PubMed, Embase, Scopus, Ebsco Publishing's Electronic Databases, and Scirus. Search was done by using key words viz. ‘Neela Thotha’, ‘Copper sulphate ’, ‘Tootiya’, and ‘CuSO4’, literature of Neela Thotha was also collected from the renowned Unani text book viz. Khazain-ul-Advia, Mohit-e-Aazam, Makhzan-ul-Mufradat, and Mufradat-e-Azizi and also from standard conventional books viz. Indian Medicinal Plants, and Parikh’s Textbook of Medical Jurisprudence Forensic Medicine and Toxicology. In conventional medicine Neela Thotha considered as poisonous substance characterized by colicky abdominal pain, vomiting, diarrhoea, severe headache, albuminuria, dyspnoea, circulatory failure, coma and death and avoids its use in human being. While in USM after proper detoxification of Neela Thotha is used in various ailments. Neela Thotha and its formulations have been claimed by Unani scholars to be useful in the management of various ailments. In this article authors have an attempt to explore properties and used of Neela Thotha in several ailments. Keywords: Neela Thotha; Tootiya; CuSO4; Copper sulphate; Copper

Odpowiednie stosowanie przepisów prawnych z zakresu kosztów postępowania lub procesu na przykładach orzecznictwa lekarskiego w wybranych sprawach dyscyplinarnych

Proper application of legal provisions regarding costs of proceedings or trial based on examples of medical jurisprudence in selected disciplinary cases The primary hypothesis assumes that there is an institution of an appropriate application of the law in disciplinary proceedings, and that its correct use strengthens the procedural guarantees of the aggrieved party in terms of costs of proceedings or a trial. The argument in favor of such a position arises from adopting a specific approach to understanding regulations referring to other legal provisions. The study uses the analysis of judicial practice. The research was conducted in order to systematize the formula of institution of an appropriate application of the law in disciplinary proceedings. The focus was on finding common goals and standards in disciplinary cases related to costs of proceedings. The article demonstrates that, within reason, the legislator provides for a two-stage use of reference to other legal provisions, if applied appropriately.

Falling from horses: medical controversy in early eighteenth-century England

On Tuesday, 12 April 1726, Robert Worger fell from his horse at Barnham Down, Kent, hitting his head on the ground ‘with strong Force’. Unconscious, he was taken to Bridge, a nearby village, and laid out at the home of Sarah Knot, ‘Nurse and Landlady to the Patient’, bled several times, given ‘volatile mixture’ (ammonia, salt, opium) and treated with purgatives and clysters. He vomited as many as five times over the course of his illness and delivered ‘half a score [of] very foul, stinking, loose Stools’. Worger died, ‘without … Agony’, at 5 am, Thursday, 21 April 1726, after living for 8 days in the care of Knot, his wife, two surgeons, an assistant, an apothecary and two physicians, Christopher Packe and John Gray. An autopsy was performed – the next night, by the light of a single candle – and, although there was little extravasation and no severe fractures or depressions in the skull, slight abnormalities were found: the cerebellum ‘Turgid with Blood’, two small fissures appeared on the os frontis. Worger’s illness and death spurred months of rebarbative public controversy: in order to exonerate themselves, both physicians published pamphlets and letters, secured affidavits, importuned surgeons and Worger’s relatives for support, vied for authority and mastery over the circumstances of the case and argued about propriety, professionalism and conduct. This paper explores Worger’s case – controversy about diagnosis and prognosis, concern with ‘knowledge and deportment’, with the status of medical offices and medical jurisprudence and with relationships between physicians, patients, surgeons – as an instance of learned medical controversy in early eighteenth-century England.

Why I became an occupational physician …

Why I became an occupational physician … briefly explores the reasons and influences behind Simon E. Asogwa’s decision to pursue a career in occupational medicine. It takes us through his initial interest in medical jurisprudence, studies at the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine, and return to Nigeria.

Morbid Subjects

This chapter reveals how Siamese state officials came to see unnatural death as a specter of foreign violence against Siamese bodies and how they appealed to medicolegal science to address this problem. In stark contrast to other colonial legal jurisdictions, where medical jurisprudence helped to bolster (white) racial privilege, the chapter argues that medicolegal concern rendered the dead and injured bodies of Siamese subjects into potentially powerful pieces of leverage against foreign residents. These residents often enjoyed extraterritorial legal privileges from the consular officials and institutions who protected them. To consider the broader conditions that helped to make unnatural death and forensic medicine a forum for political contestation in Siam, the chapter highlights two such factors: extraterritorial legal rights and the associated problem of differential standards of medicolegal evidence in foreign consular courts and the registration of Asian immigrants in Siam as the political subjects of foreign powers. Both cases offer surprising evidence suggesting that under certain conditions political affiliation transcended racial difference in the colonial world.

A Propensity to Murder: Phrenology in Antebellum Medico-Legal Theory and Practice

This essay explores the uses of phrenological theory in the realm of jurisprudence between the mid-1830s and 1850s, focusing in particular on the adoption and circulation of phrenological language within medico-legal circles through this period. The article begins by contextualizing medical jurisprudence in early America; at the same time that phrenology was gaining ground in the United States, theories of medical jurisprudence were in flux. I next turn to the concept of the propensities in phrenological theory and their relationship to theories of moral insanity developed in the same period. This article concludes with an exploration of explicit and implicit uses of phrenology, focusing on court cases featuring phrenological expertise or language. The article thus suggests both the uses of phrenology for the building of medico-legal expertise and the extent to which phrenological language around the propensities inflected lay and medico-legal discourse around criminal responsibility and insanity.