Introduction

This book delves into medico-legal history, travelling back in time to explore English law’s fascinating and often acrimonious relationship with healing and healers.

Challenging assumptions that medical law is a recent development, Law and healing traces the regulation of healers from the Church's dominance to legal battles fought among medical practitioners. As well as considering the history of the regulation of healers, this book addresses moral issues such as abortion, bodily sovereignty, and the use of cadavers in research. It highlights how fundamental legal and ethical questions continue to resurface, for example, from controversy in the Renaissance over human dissection to modern-day debates about organ donation.

Law and healing provides a colourful but critical account of the longstanding – and often fraught – relationship between two fundamental pillars of human society.