Clinical Forensic Medicine

Forensic medicine is the medical specialty that covers any matter where medicine and the law overlap. A forensic clinician must be a specialist in many areas, able to make a medical assessment of the accused and/or their victim, care for those in custody, provide occupational health advice to the police, and pass opinion on the work of others in the same field. This text is the definitive guide for all such practitioners, be they police surgeons, forensic physicians, accident and emergency specialists, paediatricians, gynaecologists or genito-urinary physicians.

Although forensic medicine has been in existence for centuries in one guise or another, it is only with the recent growth in international research that it has begun to be acknowledged as a specific discipline in its own right.