Legal and Forensic Medicine

This is a comprehensive reference text that examines the current state of Legal Medicine, which encompasses Forensic Medicine, in the 21st century. It examines the scope of both legal and forensic medicine, its application and study and has adopted a wide ranging approach including multinational authorship.

It reviews the differences between and similarities of forensic and legal medicine, the need for academic qualification, the applications to many and varied fields including international aid, military medicine, health law and the application of medical knowledge to both criminal law and tort/civil law, sports medicine and law, gender and age related factors from obstetrics through to geriatrics and palliative care as well as cultural differences exploring the Christian/Judeo approach compared with that within Islamic cultures, Buddhism and Hinduism.

The book will look at practical applications of legal medicine within various international and intercultural frameworks. This will be a seminal authoritative text in legal and forensic medicine. It has a multi-author and multinational approach which will cross national boundaries.

There is a great interest in the development of health law and legal medicine institutes around the world and this text will come in on the ground floor of this burgeoning discipline and will provide the foundation text for many courses, both undergraduate and postgraduate. It will define the place of legal medicine as a specialized discipline.