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3 books match the query 'Medical Jurisprudence'

cover of A Drunkard's Defense: Alcohol, Murder, and Medical Jurisprudence in Nineteenth-Century America

A Drunkard's Defense

Alcohol, Murder, and Medical Jurisprudence in Nineteenth-Century America

Michele Rotunda

University of Massachusetts Press, 2021

Is drunkenness a defense for murder? In the early nineteenth century, the answer was a resounding no. Intoxication was considered voluntary, and thus provided no defense. Yet as the century progressed, American courts began to extend exculpatory value to heavy drinking. The medicalization of alcohol use created new categories of mental illness which, alongside changes in the law, formed the basis for defense arguments that claimed unintended consequences and lack of criminal intent. Concurrently, advocates of prohibition cast “demon rum” and the “rum-seller” as the drunkard's accomplices in crime, mitigating offenders' actions. By the postbellum period, a backlash, led by medical professionals and an influential temperance movement, left the legacy of an unsettled legal standard.

In A Drunkard's Defense, Michele Rotunda examines a variety of court cases to explore the attitudes of nineteenth-century physicians, legal professionals, temperance advocates, and ordinary Americans toward the relationship between drunkenness, violence, and responsibility, providing broader insights into the country's complicated relationship with alcohol.

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cover of Dickens's Forensic Realism: Truth, Bodies, Evidence

Dickens's Forensic Realism

Truth, Bodies, Evidence

Andrew Mangham

The Ohio State University Press, 2017

Dickens’s Forensic Realism: Truth, Bodies, Evidence by Andrew Mangham is one of the first studies to bring the medical humanities to bear on the work of Dickens. Turning to the field of forensic medicine (or medical jurisprudence), Mangham uncovers legal and medical contexts for Dickens’s ideas that result in new readings of novels, short stories, and journalism by this major Victorian author. Dickens’s Forensic Realism argues that the rich and unstable nature of truth and representation in Dickens owes much to the ideas and strategies of a forensic Victorian age, obsessed with questioning the relationship between clues and truths, evidences and answers.
                       
As Mangham shows, forensic medicine grew out of a perceived need to understand things with accuracy, leaning in part on the range of objectivities that inspired the inorganic sciences. At the same time, it had the burden of assisting the law in convicting the guilty and in exonerating the innocent. Practitioners of forensic medicine were uniquely mindful of unwanted variables such as human error and the vagaries of interpretation. In readings of Oliver Twist, Our Mutual Friend, Bleak House, The Pickwick Papers, Great Expectations, and Dickens’s early journalism, Mangham demonstrates that these questions about signification, perception, and reality are central to the stylistic complexities and playful tone often associated with Dickens. Moreover, the medico-legal context of Dickens’s fiction illuminates the richness and profundity, style and impact of Dicken’s narratives.
 
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cover of Medicine, Law, and the State in Imperial Russia

Medicine, Law, and the State in Imperial Russia

Elisa M. Becker

Central European University Press, 2011

Examines the theoretical and practical outlook of forensic physicians in Imperial Russia, from the 18th to the early 20th centuries, arguing that the interaction between state and these professionals shaped processes of reform in contemporary Russia. It demonstrates the ways in which the professional evolution of forensic psychiatry in Russia took a different turn from Western models, and how the process of professionalization in late imperial Russia became associated with liberal legal reform and led to the transformation of the autocratic state system.
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