Medico-legal issues in Victorian medical care.

The medico-legal issues raised by 'conscientious objection' constitute a particularly revealing, though hitherto neglected instance of the emerging relationship between community responsibility and personal health during the late Victorian period. The following paragraphs seek to indicate the relevance of a medico-legal approach to Victorian social history, and to suggest certain areas of research that may well repay closer study. The origins of the term 'conscientious objector' are obscure. In Britain, apart from nominal application to the non-conformist movement in public education, and its later application to wartime services, it has had major significance in regard to the anti-vaccinationist movement during the last quarter of the nineteenth century. Indeed the term seems to have been conferred first on religious antivaccinationists in particular, and subsequently by the Vaccination Act of 1898 on all parents who expressed scruple of any kind against the vaccination of their children. We must, therefore, consider the term in its religious sense, and later suggest the importance of its broader usage. The religious conscientious objector in the nineteenth century attracted public attention by his refusal to participate in, or accept the principles of, either allopathic medical treatment or certain generally accepted medical preventives. By definition, this refusal was predicted upon adherence to particular religious beliefs which professed to be incompatible with the customary medical practices of the day. Such beliefs were ascribed to members of the Christian Science faith in its early years, and to members of the Peculiar People and other 'faith healing' sects. The Peculiar People, perhaps the paradigm example, based their own medical practices upon scriptural texts, notably James v: 14-15: