ABSTRACT
In this collection, Sara Fovargue and Alexandra Mullock have provided an important forum for the contributors to explain what it means to say that a treatment, practice, or procedure is ‘proper medical treatment’. This exploration looks both to affirming how something receives legitimacy within the medical context and to how it receives a wider, legal legitimacy. The chapters offer substantive conclusions on how we ought to understand different practices, and insightful ideas about the means that we might use in order to approach this area. In this concluding chapter, I outline four particularly strong themes that emerge from this book. I then develop some ideas about how we might approach our conceptual and analytical study of the idea of proper medical treatment, and assess our modes of understanding. In so doing, I hope to assist further scholarly endeavour in this important area of health care law. I will also situate the concerns explored within this book in a wider context of theoretical health care law and legal theory more broadly. My further goal in this chapter is to present an argument against seeking to find, or indeed establish, a single, universally applicable legal concept of proper medical treatment that could feature as fitting in all practical and legal circumstances. I will build this case by reference to distinct areas of law and practice, and distinct means of establishing their legitimacy.
