ABSTRACT
This chapter examines the place of forensic medicine in English medical education, and uncovers precisely what the average English practitioner was taught. From this, it concludes that the knowledge doctors had was sufficient to enable them to tackle a typical medico-legal case if called upon to do so. This approach circumvents the usual historiographical focus on ‘expertise’, and, in so doing, repositions the argument away from negative comparisons with neighbouring countries considered more advanced in order to concentrate on what was typical in England and Wales, and how that changed over the period under study. Thus, the chapter asks this: what did students know and how useful was it to them? The accent is not on professional expertise in and of itself, but on how those who possessed specialist knowledge imparted it to students destined to become general practitioners. An important finding derived from the teaching content delivered at four different points between the late eighteenth century and 1900 is that there was a consistent stress on infanticide, suggesting that the effort to control this offence was a particular spur for the development of forensic medicine and for the refinement of medico-legal practice.
