Intertwinements of Law and Medicine

The general aim of this book is to discuss a number of important and interrelated issues in life of modern man in medicine and the law. That discussion is not only on material aspects of those issues but also on the forms of knowledge which enable us to develop the relevant arguments and to cope with related experiences in everyday life. These issues are on the whole understood in terms of the 'law-medicine relationship' or the 'law and medicine interface'. However, a reflexion on the philosophical and cultural basis of those expressions shows the shortcomings of that appraoch and the need for an understanding of that relationship in terms of intertwining discourses.

That is the new aspect which is forwarded by this book. Its task is to explain that aspect and to introduce the many consequences related to philosophical, scientific, legal and medical problems of a modern individual in occidental society today. Specific attention will be on key-concepts such as: discourse and intertwinement, body and identity, subject and norm in discourse, metaphors, medicine and the law, founding metaphors in genetics and the law, cases and clinical pictures. The axiology of modern culture is a profile of dominant features in the legal and the medical discourse. Their power reaches far beyond their immediate practical relevance and shapes our modern mind.