Forensic Medical Expertise in Traditional China: Legal Regulation and Practice
The article deals with the problems of forensic medical expertise in traditional China in the investigation of crimes related to murder and death of people under unknown circumstances. The research featured legal acts and related comments that regulated the procedure. The author focused on the treatise of the XIII century Sung Tzu's "Washing Away of Wrongs" (Hsi yüan lu), which became the first essay on forensic medicine in world history. This document was far ahead of European works on this topic and was still in use in the early XX century. Constant conflicts between non-official comments and legal norms were one of the most serious problems that judicial practice had to face. For instance, according to the century-long shiht’u practice, specially authorized employees (wutso) with no medical training were responsible for describing internal and external injuries on the human body. Medical education was not mandatory for those performing forensic medical examination because autopsy was prohibited under the threat of punishment in the form of hard labor, and all conclusions about the causes of death were made on the basis of external examination. However, the main problem was the legal responsibility for the falsification of forensic medical examination. It often affected innocent people while real criminals managed to escape punishment, which violated the yin-yang harmony.