Abstract
For those familiar only with the current arrangements for the conduct of coroners’ post-mortem examinations in Ireland, the very idea of general practitioners playing any significant role in medico-legal investigations must appear highly anomalous. The Review of the Coroner Service by the Department of Justice, Equality and Law Reform’s Working Group, published in 2000,1 makes no mention of general practitioners, and assumes as a matter of course that all medico-legal post-mortems will be carried out either by qualified or trainee hospital pathologists or by the State Pathologist or his/her deputy, an assumption further reflected in the definition of a coroner’s post-mortem put forward by the Working Group for incorporation into the proposed new Irish Coroners’ Rules.2 Admittedly, the 1962 Coroners’ Act, which for the time being remains the principal legal authority for current Irish practice and whose text is printed in full as an Appendix to the Working Group’s Review, stipulates only that coroners’ post-mortems shall be carried out by one, or occasionally two, ‘registered medical practitioner(s)’.3
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Notes
Department of Justice, Equality and Law Reform, Review of the Coroner Service. Report of the Working Party (Dublin, 2000).
For the position in England and Wales, see especially Ian A. Burney, Bodies of Evidence: Medicine and the Politics of the English Inquest, 1830–1926 (Baltimore, 2000), Ch. 4.
For Wakley’s interest in the Coronership and medical witnessing, see especially Elizabeth Cawthon, ‘Thomas Wakley and the medical coronership: Occupational death and the judicial process’, Medical History, 30 (1986), pp. 191–202, and Burney, Bodies of Evidence, especially Ch. 1 and pp. 107–10. So far as I am aware, no serious study exists of Arthur Jacob as a medical reformer and publicist.
William Dease, Remarks on Medical Jurisprudence, Intended for the General Information of Juries and Young Surgeons (Dublin, 1793), pp. 29, 31. Dease described himself as ‘Surgeon to the United hospitals of St. Nicholas and St. Catherine [Dublin]’.
For the early history of medical evidence in coroners’ inquests and criminal trials in London, see especially Thomas R. Forbes, ‘Crowner’s quest’, Transactions of the American Philosophical Society, 68 (1978), pp. 1–52
Thomas R. Forbes, Surgeons at the Bailey: English Forensic Medicine to 1878 (New Haven and London, 1985).
For the early history of the Irish Coronership, see especially William G. Huband, A Practical Treatise on the Law Relating to the Grand Jury in Criminal Cases, the Coroner’s Jury and the Petty Jury in Ireland (Dublin and London, 1896), pp. 1–30
A.J. Otway Ruthven, A History of Medieval Ireland (2nd edn, London, 1980), pp. 179–80
John L. Leckey and Desmond Greer, Coroners’ Law and Practice in Northern Ireland (Belfast, 1998), pp. 1–6
Brian Farrell, Coroners: Practice and Procedure (Dublin, 2000), Ch. 1.
For these divergences between Irish and English practice and procedure, see especially Neal Garnham, The Courts, Crime and the Criminal Law in Ireland 1692–1760 (Blackrock, 1996), pp. 97–8; Farrell, Coroners: Practice and Procedure, pp. 12–18.
For the London County Council’s interest in coroners’ pathology and inquests in the 1880s and 1900s, see David Zuck, ‘Mr. Troutbeck as the surgeon’s friend: The coroner and the doctors’, Medical History, 39 (1995), pp. 259–87. See also Burney, Bodies of Evidence, pp. 123–4.
For this earlier incident, see The Mitchelstown Inquisition, 2 L.R. Ir. 279 (1888), and discussion in Huband, Practical Treatise on the Law, pp. 255, 277–8. For background information see Laurence M. Geary, ‘John Mandeville and the Irish Crimes Act of 1887’, Irish Historical Studies, 25:100 (1987), pp. 358–75.
The highly politicised atmosphere surrounding the medical evidence in the Mandeville and Ridley inquests may be compared with that which attended the trial of Michael Cleary a few years later for the burning to death of his wife Bridget near Ballyvadlea, Co. Tipperary, in March 1895. See Angela Bourke, The Burning of Bridget Cleary: A True Story (London, 1999).
For the decline in recorded rates of lethal violence in Ireland from c. 1860 onwards, see Mark Finnane, ‘A decline in violence in Ireland? Crime, policing and social relations, 1860–1914’, Crime, History and Society, 1 (1997), pp. 51–70
Ian O’Donnell, ‘Unlawful killing: Past and present’, Irish Jurist, 37 (n.s.) (2002), pp. 56–90, especially pp. 60–2. For the decline in the Irish inquest rate during the same period, see Leckey and Greer, Coroners’ Law and Practice, pp. 10–11, and the corresponding n. 57.
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© 2010 Michael J. Clark
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Clark, M.J. (2010). General Practice and Coroners’ Practice: Medico-legal Work and the Irish Medical Profession, c. 1830–c. 1890. In: Cox, C., Luddy, M. (eds) Cultures of Care in Irish Medical History, 1750–1970. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230304628_3
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