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  • Midwives’ oaths: everyday life and the law in seventeenth-century England

  • Sarah Fox, Margaret Brazier
  • Journal:
    Continuity and Change / Volume 38 / Issue 3 / December 2023
    Published online by Cambridge University Press:
    22 March 2024, pp. 231-253
    Print publication:
    December 2023
    • Article
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  • This article explores historical and legal approaches to past society, asking what each has to offer the other. Using early modern midwives’ oaths as a case study, it examines the extent to which the law shapes everyday life and society, and vice versa allowing us to situate early modern midwives at the intersection of a number of important and competing seventeenth-century institutions including state, church, society, and profession. We argue that a historico-legal approach to the practices of seventeenth-century midwives demands a reconsideration of the historiography of medical ethics and of the professions more broadly. It situates midwives as holders of formal office, and agents of the emergent early modern state and encourages reflection on the nature of ethical practice, and professional regulation within their social, cultural, and political context.

  • 10 - Body Parts and Baleful Stars?

  • Edited by Edward S. Dove, University of Edinburgh, Niamh Nic Shuibhne, University of Edinburgh
  • Book:
    Law and Legacy in Medical Jurisprudence
    Published online:
    23 December 2021
    Print publication:
    10 March 2022, pp 209-231

  • Summary

    Graeme Laurie and the late Ken Mason once commented that the Human Tissue Act 2004 had been ‘born under the wrong star’. Alas, ‘baleful stars’ have often blighted this area of medicine, and this chapter reflects on the past in order to consider the prospects of success for new legislation across the United Kingdom introducing ‘deemed consent’ for deceased organ donation. It outlines how a legacy of fear and distrust beset the uses of human corpses, from the ‘anatomical renaissance’ and the donation by the Kings of Scotland and England of the bodies of executed criminals for dissection to the enactment of the Human Tissue Act 2004 and the Human Tissue (Scotland) Act 2006 in the wake of public outrage over non-consensual organ retention for research and teaching. It argues that, whatever the letter of the law, grieving families cannot be ignored. A supportive, well-organised transplant system in hospitals at the point of death is as crucial as debates about the pros and cons of opt-in or opt-out. How the new legislative frameworks for donation are implemented in practice will be as important as the words in the statute-books.

Bioethics, Medicine and the Criminal Law
  • Volume 3, Medicine and Bioethics in the Theatre of the Criminal Process
  • Margaret Brazier, Suzanne Ost
  • Published online:
    05 May 2013
    Print publication:
    02 May 2013
  • To date, little analysis exists of the criminal process's roles as a regulator of medical practice and as an arbiter of bioethics, nor whether criminal law is an appropriate forum for judging ethical medical dilemmas. The conscription of criminal law into moral controversy and the (perceived) rise in criminal investigations of medical errors sets the backdrop for this innovative historical and theoretical analysis of the relationship between medicine, bioethics and the criminal process. Case studies on abortion, end of life and the separation of conjoined twins reveal how judges grapple with bioethics in criminal cases and the impact of 'theatre' on the criminal law's response to ethically controversial medical cases. A central argument is that bioethics and criminal law are not necessarily incompatible; rather, it is the theatre surrounding interactions between bioethics and criminal law that often distorts and creates tension.

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