This book addresses medico - legal history, travelling back in time to explore English law's fascinating and often acrimonious relationship with healing and healers. It challenges assumptions that medical law is new and that when law engaged with medicine, judges deferred to the 'medical man.' The book traces the regulation of healers from ecclesiastical licensing and the dominance of the Church, to the battles between different groups of doctors fought out in the courts and Parliament. Claims for malpractice, and doctors' concerns about a malpractice crisis are shown to be far from uncommon in medieval England. Until late in the nineteenth century, judges generally demonstrated little deference to any medical practitioner. Going beyond law regulating healers, the book addresses moral dilemmas. They include abortion, sovereignty over your own body, and the use of dead bodies. It highlights how the same fundamental dilemmas arise again and again .

So, controversy about human dissection in the Renaissance was echoed in violent unrest provoked by the Anatomy Act 1832, and resurfaced in the revelations about organ retention in 2000. The book shows that the relationship was a two-way process, examining how laws were framed by medical 'science', or what was thought to be science, influencing laws apparently far removed from medical law. Bizarre theories about human reproduction and female biology are seen to buttress laws of inheritance and legal incapacities imposed on married women. Law and healing provides a colourful but critical account of the longstanding relationship of two fundamental pillars of human society.