2 - The scope of legal medicine in Lancashire and Cheshire, 1660–1760

Summary

Although there were no specialized treatises on legal medicine written in English before the later eighteenth century, midwives and medical men had been called upon to give expert testimony for centuries before that. The work of the late Thomas Forbes suggests that the eighteenth-century explosion of professionally trained practitioners was accompanied by a corresponding increase in their use as experts in criminal trials. His work has been taken to demonstrate that medical testimony did not have much authority until the nineteenth century, when coroners and assize courts increasingly relied upon autopsies to help them distinguish natural or accidental deaths from suicides and homicides. Historians have only recently begun to explore crucial issues such as the impact of expert testimony and the extent to which medical practitioners mediated or modified ideas about the nature of criminal responsibility.

Forbes's concentration on capital crimes gives the impression that such cases constituted the bulk of medical practitioners' expert testimony. This was far from being the case. Most of the occasions when midwives or medical men were required to testify on oath or provide written testimony were far more mundane. This essay is an attempt to sketch the broad range of medico-legal practice in provincial England in the early modern period. Such a study is necessarily limited by gaps in the records but nevertheless a sufficiently wide range of legal medicine can be portrayed to compensate for the impossibility of making statistical comparisons.