ABSTRACT
In bringing the various strands of the study together, this chapter reviews the important role played by medicine and medical practitioners in the investigation and prosecution of the most serious offences against the person, homicide and rape. It reflects on the role of doctors as partners in the effective administration of criminal justice, alongside coroners, judges, jurors, lawyers, magistrates and the police. As the knowledge and skill that medical professionals could contribute to the investigation of crime developed, so too did criminal justice procedures evolve to acknowledge and incorporate doctors. Doctors were an integral part of the process by which adversarial trial procedure was established as a contest between prosecution and defence, following a parallel, and then increasingly overlapping, path to lawyers. The chapter ends with a brief discussion of the several directions in which future research might usefully go.
