The campaign for medical coroners in nineteenth-century England and its aftermath

This paper will be published in two parts. It will consider the Victorian campaign for an exclusively medical coronership with special reference to Lancashire and will relate the same to contemporary problems. It will show how the English system of lay coroners without, until 1926, any professional qualifications, confronted the challenges of the modern state and its demands for accurate death registration. It will stress that coroners were locally elected judicial officers dealing with local deaths with individualistic approaches and considerable autonomy. It will focus on coronial qualifications after 1836, when the required medical certification of causes of death meant that doctors played a key role in the inquest system in distinguishing natural from unnatural deaths. It will emphasize the fragmented nature of legislation relating to coroners and inquests. In the second part of the paper (to be published in Mortality 9:3) the Lancashire elections and appointments will be placed in a national context. It will look to the past to understand present coronial problems. The paper will ask whether, if medical campaigns had succeeded, the departmental committees of inquiry of 1910, 1936 and 1971 would have been commissioned and whether the 2003 Shipman Inquiry and the 2003 Luce Fundamental Review would have been needed. Finally, it will ask if the former Inquiry and latter Report will be implemented by legislation in whole or in part or whether they will experience the fate of previous governmental inquiries into coronial reforms

Autonomy · Context (archaeology · Individualism · Inquest · Legislation · Political science · Sociology · Autopsy Techniques and Outcomes · Health and Conflict Studies · Historical Economic and Social Studies · History · Law · Medicine

• Suicide by Oxygen Deprivation with Helium

  Rüssel D Ogden, Shereen Hassan•Death Studies•2011

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