Legal and Forensic Medicine

What is Forensic Medicine?

Legal and Forensic Medicine, as we conceive it nowadays, emerged in the XVI century when medical intervention was required for legal proceedings. Forensic medicine can be defined as medicinal procedures that are applied to judicial decisions. By request, a doctor must report, declare or inform in accordance with existing criminal law. Judges at any moment could ask for help from a doctor and the doctor is obliged to provide this help. The doctor´s declaration may determine the judicial decision.

What does a forensic doctor do?

The activity carried out by forensic doctors is public and it is required by judges, public prosecutors’ offices and justice courts.

Some tasks performed by forensic physicians may be found in the following video:

Legal and Forensic Medicine is a broad speciality encompassing a wide number of SUBDISCIPLINES: 

Forensic Toxicology: It can be applied to a living person or to a corpse. It is characterized by the need of an accurate and quantitative result. It is required when a toxic substance may have produced a psychological alteration or when a crime is committed under its influence. Furthermore, it is also necessary when a death may be due to intoxication, or when a toxic is found in a body.

Dactyloscopy: Fingerprinting deals with the study, classification, register and recuperation of the printings of distal hand phalanges. This subspecialty is the best known applied science for identification of individuals.

There are other important prints:

Forensic Genetics: It consists of the analysis of DNA with forensic aims, among them: biological evidence of kinship, forensic biology, body identification (e.g.: mass disasters, identification of corpses, etc.) and evolution studies.

Forensic Thanatology/Pathology: This subspeciality studies the human death phenomenon. It applies the scientific method to forensic techniques in order to confirm a death and establish the cause of death. The autopsyis a post-mortem surgical procedure aimed to establish the causes of the death and to determine the presence of diseases or injuries.

In the following video an autopsy performed to find out what caused the death is shown (It contains images that may be disturbing):

The possibility to perform virtual autopsies is one of the recent breakthroughs in medicine. With techniques such as computed tomography and magnetic resonance imaging, a virtual "bloodless" autopsy can be performed on a potential victim of a crime. It can be observed in the following video:

Forensic Anthropology: It deals with the study of bone remains and other marks or lesions in order to identify a corpse: the cause of death, date, age, gender, race and anthropometric characteristics, providing the maximum information to the police to help for the identification of the individual. This process starts when the police finds an unidentified corpse skeletonized or in an advanced state of putrefaction.

Forensic Psychiatry: Aims to clarify those cases that need a particular consideration due to a special mental condition of the person involved. Nowadays, Psychiatry and Law are closely linked when a crime has been committed by a person with a mental disorder.

In Spain, legal and forensic Medicine is an official service depending on regional “Comunidades Autónomas” (in those in which the governance has been transferred) and in other cases from the Instituto Nacional de Toxicología y Ciencias Forenses (INTCF). The INTCF is a technical body under the Ministry of Justice, whose mission is to assist the administration of justice and contribute to the unity of scientific criteria and the quality of analytical competence, and the development of forensic science. His organization and supervision is under the control of the Ministry of Justice. It is based in Madrid and its scope extends to the entire national territory.

1. What do we understand by legal and forensic medicine?

2. Know the different subdisciplines of legal and forensic medicine.

3. Medicolegal autopsy: What is it and when is it performed?

4. Familiarize yourself with the different types of toxicological tests.