Human rights issues affecting women in Napoleonic legal medicine textbooks.

Legal medicine (a name which may be a misnomer) is not, strictly speaking, an art of healing.’ Rather, it deals with the application of medical opinions and knowledge to judicial proceedings. While it is usually said that there were five distinct periods in the history of legal medicine-the ancient period of the Hebrew priest-judges and the Egyptians; the Roman period; the mediaeval period of Salic and Germanic law; the period of canon law from 1200 to 1600; and the modern period since 1600-it was really only in the French Revolutionary/Napoleonic era that legal medicine became definitively established.2 The medical profession was then engaged in the process, begun during the Enlightenment, of supplanting the Church as the arbiter of women’s b0dies.j Moreover, legal medicine represents a convergence of the ideas of the medical and legal professions, both of which were male dominated, in the actual administration of justice. The Napoleonic courts were, therefore, a ‘crossroads’ of interaction between two systems that collaborated in the nominally Catholic but recently secularised milieu of the early nineteenth century in determining women’s place and role in Imperial society. The three subdivisions within French legal medicine are called (1) determination of death, (2) generation and (3) rights and duties4 It is primarily in the latter two areas that so many of what we today would term ‘human rights issues’ pertaining only or especially to women occur and upon which this paper focuses. Imperial professors and publishing scholars of legal medicine, medical practitioners and chemists who used their manuals in providing information for criminal a.nd civil law courts were frequently concerned with human rights questions that pertained to live women’s bodies, the foetus and the child. The opinions of these first professors of legal medicine who trained the doctors who, in turn, advised judges is preserved in the comprehensive manuals they wrote for use during the Grand Empire and Restoration. The surgeon Jean-Jacques Belloc (1730-1807) of the Department of Lot et Garonne is honoured by reference works as the modern founder of French legal medicine. He and his students disinterred cadavers so as to have subjects for dissection. The principles he taught his pupils were published in the Year IX as Cours de mkdecine IPgale judiciare, thkorique etpratique. and re-edited in 18 11 and 1819.5 The anatomist-obstetrician Antoine Dubois (1756-1837) also was an important originator of legal medicine but unfortunately he never published. However, after 1793 Dubois worked as the assistant of Francois Chaussier (1746-1828), who probably was the first teacher of legal medicine, while both men inspected military hospitals. After accompanying General Bonaparte to