Medisch onderwijs en de professie: de gerechtelijke geneeskunde in België in de 19e eeuw

Abstract

Medical education and the profession: legal medicine in nineteenth-century Belgium In nineteenth-century Belgium, the judicial responsibility for certain legal fields, forensic psychiatry among others, shifted from the legal to the medical profession. To understand the growing medicalization and how and why this shift occurred, the author discusses the theoretical evolution of both the legal and medical sciences during nineteenth-century Belgium. The teaching of forensic medicine, the role of the forensic pathologist as judicial expert, the schedule of charges for legal expertise, and the reform of several articles of the penal code, all contributed to the historical context within which this shift occurred.