Gwei-Djen Lu

A history of forensic medicine in China

INTRODUCTION From the very dawn of civilization, as soon as any ethical conceptions of justice began to be entertained, it must have been incumbent on magistrates and juristic officials everywhere to try to differentiate between accidental death, murder, and suicide. Soon other, similar questions began to arise as well, questions concerned with poisoning, wounding, arson, virginity, miscarriage and the like. Did a man drown by being pushed into the water, or was he already dead when he was thrown in; did he die when his house burned down around him, or was he murdered first? All this comes under the head ofwhat is called forensic medicine, medical jurisprudence, medico-legal evidence, and the relative participation of jurists and physicians in developing it is a very interesting story. The advances of anatomy, physiology and pathology evidently bore very markedly on the subject. Broadly speaking, the physicians tended to come into the field, writing learned treatises on all these topics at the time of the Scientific Revolution in Europe, in the days of Galileo and Vesalius when distinctively modern science was born. Later on we shall look at the history of this genre of writing in more detail, and yet we shall have to celebrate as our focal point here the greatest work of all the Middle Ages anywhere on forensic medicine, namely the Hsi Yuan Chi Lu [l] (The Washing Away of Unjust Imputations, or Wrongs), written not by a scholar-physician but by a jurist, Sung Tzhu [2], in AD 1247, during the Southern Sung period. As we shall see, however, his medical knowledge was quite considerable. There is no clear evidence that such knowledge was officially made use of before his time in establishing proof in courts of law, either in ancient Egypt, Babylonia, or Greece; yet the Hippocratic Corpus does discuss several medico-legal questions. Such matters as the relative fatality of wounds in different parts ofthe body, the possibility of super-foetation, the average duration of pregnancy, the viability of embryos before full term, and malingering, all of which are dealt with in the Corpus, must have come before the courts of law from time to time.

Hygiene and Preventive Medicine in Ancient China

we shall not now consider. Moreover, in the early times the relations between medical philosophy and the thoughts of the writers on philosophy, ethics and logic were especially cIose ; for example, it is interesting that throughout the ages the duty of the Confucian literati to care for their parents according to the precepts of filial piety was a powerful influence in assisting the growth of medical science. It must, of course, be understood that we have to deal with ancient and early mediaeval conceptions which in practice had only a limited application to the life of the mass of the