Law and Medicine: a history in three acts

This chapter acts as an introduction to the historical origins of health law and also to history as a discipline for legal scholars. The three authors then take three acts to explore health law and convey three methodologies of history that each offer a means of understanding legislation, and by doing so we identify the themes of specialisation, medical authority, and the paternalism baked into the Law. Wynter looks at the 1913 Mental Deficiency Act through a ‘micro-history’ approach. In a nod to the ‘longue durée’ means of scrutinising the past, Reinarz considers the nineteenth and twentieth-century roots of the Fireguards Act (1952). Davis focuses on the 1967 Abortion Act, taking more of a holistic ‘macro-history’ technique. The process of working with health law scholars and each other has revealed areas of the legal past that historians have yet to address and what might be gained from working together.